


Fortune Favors the Brave

by thecrazychatlady



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Multi, POV Female Character, POV Multiple, Rebellion, Revolution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:33:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23321737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecrazychatlady/pseuds/thecrazychatlady
Summary: Fiona, Annette, and Viola are three young women in a world breaking apart at the seams. The government of Dorenon is corrupt and a war with Patria looms on the horizon. They all have different reasons for joining the Novareen rebellion and different reasons for wanting a new republic. Fiona, quiet and determined, is a former mercenary. Annette, ever optimistic, is a former thief. Viola, learning magic and a crack shot with a sniper rifle, is a former noblewoman. The three of them will face threats from their pasts as they help the rebels take down the corrupt oligarchy.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Arrivederci

“Viola,” Fiona hissed, as she clung to the pale windowsill. “You better be in position, or so help me, I’ll—”

“Yeah, yeah,” drawled a voice into her right ear, projected with that fancy spell lattice she’d been working on for weeks. “I’m in position.” As Fiona hung, suspended, she heard the sharp clicks of her partner’s rifle setup. “Ready to take out any backup,” said Viola. 

“I’m already on the roof!” chirped Annette in her left ear. “Going in now!” 

Fiona grinned, sharp and white like a slash of pale bone beneath her cloth mask, then pulled herself onto the sill. She dug around in the pouch at her waist and pulled out a small knife, the handle dull brown under the light of the half-moon, and jammed it underneath the frame. With a little bit of wiggling, she heard a tiny click and withdrew her knife. 

A tug later and the window was open. Moonlight streamed into the shadowy room, occupied by lush-looking furniture and tacky gold accents. Fiona perched on the sill for a moment, a silhouette in dark brown, before digging in her pouch again to withdraw a piece of paper. She pressed it to the wall. “Expand,” she murmured, and the spidery blue-black lines of Viola’s spell crawled off the paper and onto the pink floral wallpaper. 

They held for a moment before flaring a subdued yellow, and Fiona cursed quietly. Yellow meant there was some sort of magical security system, something she’d hoped to avoid on this particular job. “Viola,” she said softly. “Color?” came the sharp reply. 

“Yellow.”

“Dull or bright?”

“Dull.”

Fiona heard a long, relieved exhale. “Not bad. Has the matrix expanded onto the floor or is it sticking to the wall?”

“Wall.”

“Avoid the floor,” Viola said sharply. “Furniture, too. My money’s on a pressure-based detection lattice built into the floorboards, which means you  _ cannot  _ let anything that could push downwards hold your weight.”

“Got it,” said Fiona, already eyeing the light fixtures. The gilded brackets looked sturdy enough to hold her. She closed the window with a soft thud and gently laid her fingers on the paper square. “Release,” she said, and the lines retracted. She’d get two more uses out of it before the stress would cause the medium to disintegrate and render the spell useless. 

She tucked it back into her pouch, inhaled, and exhaled slowly to center herself as she stood on the sill. In a single, explosive movement, she leapt and grabbed one of the sconces, bracing her feet on the ugly wallpaper. She slowly made her way towards the door, swinging from sconce to sconce until she reached the frame. It was made of a sturdy-looking oak and had a moveable glass window at the top, probably designed to let light in from the hallway.

She quickly surveyed the outside hallway, and, upon seeing nobody, nodded to herself.

Using her small knife, Fiona eased the window open. It would be tight, but she could fit if she crouched. An exhaled breath later, she was clinging to the top of the door and pulling herself through the window until she was hanging on from the other side. Advantages of being short. 

Ignoring the strain in her arms, she laid the paper against the wall and whispered the activation command. This time, the matrix stayed a dark blue and extended onto the floor. Fiona allowed herself a single blink of relief before dropping lightly onto the ground. The paper went back into the pouch and instead, she gripped a throwing knife in her left hand. Her right hand she left unoccupied as she strode down the hallway, keeping to the shadows. 

“Annette,” she said. 

“I got you,” replied her cheery partner. “Hallway?”

“Yeah.”

“Head into the dining hall. I’m trying to work out the security system on my floor, attic’s oddly well-protected. Detection matrices  _ everywhere _ . Dining hall has a...thingy. Thing. Viola?”

A second later, Fiona heard her snap her fingers. “Balcony, that’s it. With weird decorative crosshatching. You can climb to my floor, maybe you can figure something out from that end.”

“You need me to bail you out?” Fiona said, a sarcastic tilt to her voice. 

“Hmph.” 

“Kidding. I’m coming,” Fiona replied and walked faster down the hallway until she got to a set of heavy wooden doors. She reached out a hand to touch them until Annette’s voice bubbled in her ear, panicked. “Don’t touch the door! Viola says—”

In her other ear, Viola’s calm voice cut off Annette. “Security lattice had something to do with laceration.”

Fiona winced and took the detection paper back out. She laid it onto the wall beside the door, activated it, and watched as the matrix expanded.

It was burning a dull red.

“Red,” she said quietly, “and it doesn’t want to touch the door.” Viola let out a quiet curse. 

“It’s not bright,” she offered. 

“Small mercies,” the woman on the other end of the communication spell replied. “Alright. You’re not going through that door, it’s just not happening. Can you get to the hatching some other way?”

Fiona nodded, realized Viola couldn’t see her, and said, “Got it.”

She tapped the slip of paper and released it, watching it crumble into ash, before crossing the hallway to the large windows. They weren’t the kind that could open. Could she break a window?

“Don’t touch the window,” Viola said flatly, echoing her thoughts. “Reinforcement against shattering and another pressure-based detection ward are somehow tied to the glass. Annette’s gotten at least that much out of the security system.”

Fiona heard her sigh. “I could help you guys out more if I was actually there,” Viola grumbled. Apparently she had said this to both Fiona and Annette, as the latter chimed in. “We need you on sniper backup,” Annette pointed out, surprisingly practical. 

“I suppose.”

“You’re also moderating the communications and helping us with the magic stuff,” Fiona replied, to which Viola sighed again. “Yeah,” she murmured, before her voice suddenly turned urgent. “Hold on. Why do these people have guests at one in the morning?”

“I’m back on the roof,” Annette said a second later. “I see them. Carriage, four horses. Can’t make out the symbol on the door.”

Viola sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s the coat of arms of the Bellmonte  _ family _ . Someone is coming out of the gates to greet them.”

“Won’t they take down the security to let them in?” Fiona asked. 

Viola paused. “They would have to,” she breathed. “The entire system is so jumbled that they would have to turn it all off at once, instead of isolating a room or floor. Can you and Annette get somewhere secure where you won’t be found? This is our chance.”

“Dusty cabinet, check!” Annette piped up. 

“Be careful. The Bellmonte churn out some of the most powerful mages. Stay somewhere high or abandoned.”

Fiona blew out a breath. Her heart was pounding and everything seemed a little bit sharper around the edges as adrenaline rushed through her veins. She glanced around, looking for somewhere to hide, before she looked up. 

“Ventilation system?” she asked. 

“Do it, quickly,” Viola said sharply. Fiona backed up, almost touching the window, before sprinting across the hallway and taking a running leap. She gripped the wall sconce and pulled herself up until she could toe the friezes decorating the upper part of the wall. The vent was right there, and large enough that she could shimmy inside. 

She popped open the grate and pulled herself inside. It was a tight fit, but she managed to maneuver the grate around her body and back into place. 

“Safe,” she muttered. “Viola? Annette?”

“Safe,” replied Annette, and Viola echoed her. “I’m watching through my scope,” she said, “but I can’t monitor their movements once they get inside. You’ll be on your own.”

Fiona managed to crack a grin, cramped as she was inside the ventilation shaft. “We’ve got this,” she assured her partner. Viola made a noncommittal noise. “Switching communications to open,” she murmured, “so we can all hear each other without my moderation.”

Neither Annette nor Fiona replied as rustles were heard on the other end of the line. Seconds passed, though to Fiona’s rapidly beating heart, it felt more like minutes or hours. The shaft was incredibly cramped, and she wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination. “They’re in,” Viola said. “Fiona, you’re the closest to the entry door even though you’re on the second floor. They’re probably going to pass through your hallway.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Fiona replied, her eyes trained on the large doors at the other end of the hall. Sure enough, they creaked open a few minutes later, and four people stepped through. Fiona muttered her descriptions, careful to keep her voice low as she silently bemoaned the lack of a way to send visuals to her teammates. “Elderly man, thinning gray hair. Portly and short. Red waistcoat and a dark brown cane, gold spectacles. Younger man, dark black hair in a ponytail down his back, black waistcoat and jacket. Tall, walks with a slight limp. Young woman, purple evening gown. Short blonde hair and a ring on her left ring finger. Matches one on the young man’s hand.”

“That would probably be the newly engaged Bellmonte heiress, Regina, and her fiance, Darian Reynaldi,” replied Annette thoughtfully. 

“Up and coming stars on the dueling circuit,” added Viola, audibly sucking in a breath. “Reynaldi can do brilliant work with a modified handgun and inscribed bullets.” She sounded envious as Annette chimed in that Regina, her Bellmonte fortune granting her access to more expensive mediums, was skilled in quick-draw paper lattices. The kind that Viola was just starting to figure out with a lot of pain and thievery.

“The man with the cane is the master of the house,” Fiona said softly. “He’s our mark.”

“We know,” said Annette, her tone switching to a grim one. “Terrence Shioda, military general. Watch out for him. He always has a weapon on him somewhere.”

Fiona watched the three people amble slowly down the hall, making small talk. If she pressed her ear to the grate, she could just make out what they were saying.

“We received an anonymous tip, General,” Reynaldi was saying. “Someone has been threatening to break into your mansion.”

“And do what?” the old man asked, chuckling. “My boy, there’s nothing in this mansion worth stealing that isn’t under the strongest defenses money can buy.”

“Not riches, no,” Bellmonte interjected, pushing her hair out of her face with an irritated jerk. “But your papers, General?”

At this, Shioda seemed to grow solemn. “My lady, my papers cannot be accessed without my  _ express consent _ . You could rip my finger off and use it to imprint on my desk and it wouldn’t do a thing.”

Regina Bellmonte still looked concerned but quieted for the moment, temporarily appeased, as her fiance picked up the conversation. “All of your papers?” he pressed. “I mean, of course, expense reports, written orders, classified files...all of them are secure?”

“All of my official documents,” he replied firmly. 

“And your personal ones?” Reynaldi asked, fingers flexing on the head of his cane. “Letters, journal entries?”

At this, the general looked uneasy. “Those don’t contain state secrets,” he countered. 

“But they could very well be incriminating,” the younger man replied. His dark eyebrows furrowed as if in contemplation.

“Is that an accusation?” Shioda blustered, immediately bristling, and Bellmonte stepped in to soothe his ruffled feathers. “Not at all,” she interjected, her voice smooth and reassuring. “Only a precaution. My father, a good friend of yours, is concerned. I apologize for Darian, his mouth sometimes gets the better of him.”

Rather than looking mulish, Reynaldi kept his thoughtful expression. “My apologies, General,” he said finally, stopping in front of one of the large windows to look out onto the moors. “It was a poor choice of phrasing.”

“Indeed,” the general replied severely, but the set of his shoulders softened somewhat. “Is that why you two are here at such an inconvenient hour, then? To warn me of thieves and miscreants? Because I assure you, I have my security system well in hand.” He, too, turned to gaze at the moors. 

An amused giggle broke through the tense silence over Viola’s communication line. “No, you don’t,” Annette whispered. “I just disabled it. Fiona, can you confirm?”

Fiona stayed silent, not knowing how and unable to reply. 

“Recording slip,” Viola said finally. “If Annette took down the security, the anti-listening field over the manor should be down. If the paper and matrix stay intact, you’ll be fine even when Shioda turns it back on.”

Fiona let out a quiet huff of assent. Some twisting and wiggling later, she managed to take out the red piece of paper from her pocket and fix it to the grate. “Listen,” she whispered, the word just barely escaping her lips, and a burning crimson matrix expanded. Her hood and mask clung to her with sweat. 

A beat later and Viola’s voice sounded in her ear. “Judging from the lack of ripping and crumbling noises, we’re good to go,” she said dryly. “Hopefully Bellmonte and Reynaldi have something useful to say.”

The conversation in the hall had resumed as both Reynaldi and Shioda turned away from the window. “My papers and valuables are secure, Darian,” the man said quietly. “Regina, do tell your father he has nothing to worry about. Theodore always was an anxious man, and, as usual, his paranoia is unwarranted.”

Bellmonte made a noncommittal noise before smoothing a hand over her hair. It seemed to be a nervous habit, Fiona noticed. 

“There is another matter of concern,” she said hesitantly. Her face appeared wan in the moonlight and she looked as if she was not getting nearly enough sleep, judging from the barely-hidden bruises under her sea-green eyes. 

The general turned to her, one eyebrow raised. “Yes? Spit it out, I do want to get in a little more sleep before sunrise.” 

“The rebellion in Nova,” the heiress blurted out. “Father is also worried there’s more to it than it seems.”

Fiona stiffened inside the vent. Nova was their base of operations. If Shioda found out now….

“I have the unrest in Nova well in hand,” Shioda replied. “They’re intellectuals, dissidents without any real manpower. We will have our victory over them as soon as all of them are found.”

“Victory,” murmured Reynaldi, his grip on his cane white-knuckled. “You would achieve it, too.”

“Would?” the general asked sharply. Bellmonte seemed to recoil at his tone. “It’s just.…” She hesitated and ran a hand through her hair again. “My father received critical information from a resistance defector. The revolutionaries have a plan to take down the government from within. He was too low down the chain of command to offer any specifics, but…”

“Shit,” Viola said.

Shioda looked angry, now. “I’ll send in more soldiers,” he spat. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. We will have them dead within a matter of days.”

Reynaldi turned his gaze on the man. “A matter of days,” he echoed. “Time is crucial. The unrest in Nova gets stronger by the day. Is it not time to send in magic users?”

At this, the man bristled again. “We don’t need magic to take down rebellious filth,” he spat. “They’re soft, all of them down in that backwater town. Not a drop of courage among them or an ounce of tactical thinking. They will be defeated not by your  _ magic _ but by actual soldiers, who have been fighting longer than you’ve been alive, boy.”

“Now, general—” Bellmonte tried, but the man ignored her. “Now get out of my house,” he said gruffly, and walked away down the hall at a fast clip. Once he had gone through the doors to the dining hall, Reynaldi slumped visibly. 

“That would have gone better,” he said in a low voice. 

“He’s always been like that,” Bellmonte replied. “I told you not to mention magic. The man hates it, always has.”

“But he’s being stupid,” Reynaldi replied, shaking his head. “A single magical unit would speed up the counter-revolutionaries immensely. It could guarantee a timely victory when a larger time frame is entirely in the rebels’ favor.”

“I know, I know,” his fiancee said softly, and took his hand. “But General Shioda knows what he’s doing. You’d never meet a more brilliant tactician, that man.”

“Or a more stubborn one,” Reynaldi muttered. 

Bellmonte grimaced. “Yes, but if he says he can crush the revolt, then he can. Now come, we should leave. Before the general turns his security back on.”

“Why on earth does a man who hates magic have a magical security system?” Reynald grumbled as he and the blonde woman beside him began to walk down the hall. 

“He hates magical fighting,” Bellmonte answered, her tone dismissive. “But he recognizes its efficiency and usefulness in other practical applications.”

“Stubborn old man,” Reynaldi sighed, and at that point, the couple had exited the hall and Fiona could only hear their muffled voices from her place in the vent. She waited a couple more minutes to make sure nobody was going to come in before releasing the listening slip and tucking it back into her pocket. “We’re clear,” she said, knowing her teammates could hear her, and popped the grate. Slowly, she made her way back down onto the hallway floor. 

“I’m upgrading this job to a red in terms of importance. We get what we need and get out as quickly and cleanly as possible,” said Fiona.

“Prioritize objective or not getting caught?” Annette asked. 

A pause, and then she sighed. “Objective,” she replied heavily. “If you’re caught, we just need to act quicker on what we get, anyway.”

“Got it,” Viola replied

Fiona strode through the doors to the dining hall. Without pausing to admire the opulent furnishings and decor, Fiona glanced around for the patio. She found the hatching quickly after stepping onto the patio, the cool night air whipping around her face. It was a beautiful night for breaking and entering, she thought wryly. 

She scaled the wall within minutes and alighted on the third floor, where Annette was waiting to greet her. “His office is there,” she whispered, pointing down the hallway. “And his bedroom is downstairs. From what I could tell of the monitoring system I hijacked, Shioda’s in there right now.”

“Bedroom or office?” Fiona asked, raising an eyebrow she knew Annette couldn’t see. 

Annette winced. “Bedroom,” she replied, “sorry.”

Fiona waved her apology away and strode toward the office door, pulling out a second detection slip. “You’re sure the security system is down?” 

Her partner nodded, short auburn hair bouncing around her face. Fiona spared a thought as to how irritating hair like that must be when climbing or sneaking. One of her own pet peeves was hair in her face while on the job. Accordingly, her black hair was pulled back into a severe bun so no flyaways could interfere with her eyesight. 

She pressed the piece of paper to the wall beside the door and whispered the activation command. The matrix spread over the office door but avoided the lock entirely, glowing a faint yellow. 

“You said the security system was down,” Fiona said sharply. Annette shook her head. “It is, but this could be something local that isn’t tied to the general house security.”

“Color? Is it avoiding the lock?” asked Viola’s voice.

“Faint yellow, and yes.” 

Fiona heard Viola sigh again. “Annoying,” she muttered. “Alright, that’s probably a localized detection ward, like Annette said. If it’s the lock, it’s tied to a key. Literally. Shioda probably has it on him.”

Fiona swore quietly, and Annette’s round face collapsed into a pensive frown. “You can’t take down the ward?” the latter asked. 

“Not from here, and even if I could, there could be other layered wards behind it triggered by the collapse of the first.”

“Too much risk, not enough reward,” Fiona muttered. 

“Exactly. You have to get that key from Shioda.” 

Fiona swore again and checked the time on her watch. It was two in the morning, so they had time. But not much. She weighed her options before speaking again. “Here’s the plan,” she said softly. “Annette, you’ve got the lightest hands. You’ll be the one in Shioda’s bedroom. Viola, I want you on the roof. Watch out for anyone coming in and at that range, you’re close enough to take them out more accurately than your current position.”

“And you?” Viola asked, and from the sound of it, was already packing up her kit so she could move from the copse of trees she had set up in.

“I’ll be causing a distraction on the other side of the house,” she replied grimly. “Annette, get somewhere you can watch the bedroom.”

“Got it,” Viola and Annette said in chorus.

“But what if the key is on Shioda, not in the bedroom?” Viola asked, to which she sighed. “It’s a risk we have to take. If the key’s on Shioda, we’ll figure something out after.”

“Cross your fingers!” Annette said optimistically. 

“Cross your fingers,” Fiona murmured, before turning around to the window. With quick fingers, she unlatched the glass and climbed out. As she clung to the wall, she allowed herself a glance over her shoulder at the foggy moors. A man like this, she thought grimly, shouldn’t be allowed to live somewhere this beautiful. 

Fiona scuttled down the wall, her hands finding purchase on the stone and wood crosshatching. She quickly made her way down back to the second floor dining room before sprinting through the hallway on the other side. She soon found herself in a balcony garden of a sorts, full of pretty, exotic flowers in ceramic pots and marble ornaments.

Her mouth quirked up into a wry grin. Perfect, though she did regret that the flowers would be casualties of war. 


	2. Sayonara

Annette was crouched in the shadows of the second floor hallway, having followed Viola down the crosshatching. One of the doors had light coming out from under the wood. Her target, she thought grimly. 

It was a shame, too. He had such nice ornamental plants. Part of her wished she had pocketed one of the itty-bitty succulents she had seen on the way in, perching on one of the windowsills, but she hadn’t thought to at the time. 

She heard a loud crash from the other side of the mansion, accompanied by more crashing noises. That would be Fiona...she resisted the urge to giggle. A second large crash echoed through the estate, and the door she was watching slammed into the wall. Shioda ran out, cursing and loading what looked like a pistol. 

Annette’s blood ran cold. Fiona better stay safe. 

As soon as he had hustled down the hallway, the click of the safety ringing in her ears, she slipped into his bedroom and glanced around. Her mask was itchy and she kind of hated it, though she recognized the necessity. Shioda’s room was brightly lit with warm, butter yellow electric lights. His bed was about as large as half of the room on its own—a plush, luxurious thing, with expensive blankets and enormous pillows. Annette’s fingers itched to tug at the tassels as she passed them by, making a beeline toward the small desk in the corner. 

It was made of a light-colored wood and absolutely covered in papers and pens. She wouldn’t find the files she needed there, she knew, so she left them alone and instead went for the drawers. Quickly, Annette pulled out one of Viola’s fancy-shmancy detection slips and pressed it to the surface of the desk. The dark lines of the spell crawled over the entirety of the wood and remained an inert blue-black. 

Pursing her lips in concentration, she released the slip and switched it out for a pair of lockpicks. With nimble fingers, she picked the lock on the first three drawers within two minutes, counting the seconds in her head. The first drawer contained letters, unopened ones, and a letter opener with a mother-of-pearl handle. The second contained two books—one in a language that Annette was unfamiliar with, and the other titled  _ When Nothing is Sacred _ , by Helen Cora. She opened the third, hoping to see a key. 

Annette instead saw another pistol, beside which lay an amo cartridge and an oily rag. She narrowed her eyes and weighed her options. Take the gun, which would probably dramatically increase her odds of survival but also her odds of getting caught, or cut her losses?

Instead, she did what she always did when faced with a tough decision. “Viola, there’s a pistol here but no key.”

“Take the gun,” came the immediate reply. “There isn’t anyone nearby for an extraction team and Fiona authorized lethal force. Find that key, Annette.”

“The game just got a lot more serious,” Annette replied, her voice light, as she picked up the pistol and loaded it. “Six shots,” she mused. 

More crashes sounded from the other side of the house, along with two gunshots. The noise jolted the woman into action as she searched the room, pressing the bedframe in all the typical places one might hide a secret compartment. She turned the whole place upside down, to no avail. “Fiona, it’s probably on him,” she said, trusting that her taciturn teammate would hear over the noise. 

She heard a quiet curse. “I need you here,” Fiona said sharply. “I can’t take him down myself.”

“Currently shooting down all the people Shioda’s sending out with distress calls,” Viola piped up, her voice grim as her rifle went off. “Three people are bleeding out in the driveway.”

“Hurry,” said Fiona. 

Annette murmured an affirmative, leaving the room trashed and slipping the letter opener in her bag for good measure. It certainly looked sharp enough to be of use in a pinch. 

She sprinted down the hall, unlocking she safety and bursting through the doors. “Location?” she asked. 

“Patio on the other end,” Fiona replied, sounding winded. 

Her mouth set into an uncharacteristically hard line, Annette sped up. She burst onto the patio to see Fiona, her hands up in the universal sign of surrender, as Shioda pointed the gun straight at her. “Who are you?” he barked.

Fiona didn’t reply, her eyes staring fixedly into the general’s own, as Annette crept up behind him. She pressed the barrel of her pistol into the man’s thinning hair.

“Drop it,” she said quietly. A second passed with the three of them in a standoff, Shioda’s shoulders rigid, before he dropped the pistol. “Kick it away,” she added. 

He nudged it away with his foot, sending it careening to rest by Fiona, who picked it up. 

“Who are you?” Shioda asked again, his voice steely. 

Neither of them replied. “Key to your office,” Annette replied instead. “Where is it?”

“You’re not getting my documents,” he growled. In response, Annette pressed the cool barrel of the pistol harder into his skull. “Where is it,” she repeated.

The general grit his teeth. “Someone is bound to have noticed the noise,” he pointed out. 

“Plenty of people,” Fiona said, dusting herself off. “They’re currently in pools of their own blood.”

“You’re not getting into my office.”

“Sorry, General,” Annette murmured, her mouth twisted into a pout. “But I think we are.” In one swift motion, she pistol-whipped the older man hard enough to knock him into unconsciousness. Fiona started searching his clothes. 

“Nothing,” she said frustratedly. 

“No key?” asked Viola over the line. 

“No key,” Annette confirmed. 

There was a beat of silence when nobody spoke, Fiona and Annette staring at the prone body of General Shioda. 

“It doesn’t have to look like a key,” Viola pointed out finally. “I imagine that, though he finds it distasteful, there might be a cloaking spell. But to tie it to an object for any length of time, there needs to be some magically-conductive material in it.”

“Like what?” Fiona asked, sitting back on her haunches. 

“Certain kinds of wood, highly-refined silk, gemstones like rubies and sapphires, mother of pearl…”

“Like a mother of pearl handle?” Annette asked, taking out the letter opener she had slipped into her pocket. 

“Exactly,” Viola said, and Annette could hear the smile in her partner’s voice. 

Fiona’s laugh was a quiet sound, low and amused in the still night-time air. “Of course you picked up the shiny letter opener,” she said softly. 

Annette beamed. “You know me so well.”

Out of Fiona’s bag, they pulled some rope and bound Shioda’s hands and feet. It was rough and would probably leave burns if the man struggled too much, but just to be safe, they slapped one of Viola’s immobilization matrices on them. As long as the ropes bound him, Shioda would be unable to move—though such things were never foolproof. Strong emotions and will often interacted strangely with Viola’s magic, for some reason. Annette hadn’t ever had that problem. Instead, when she tried doodling the same intricate lattices that Viola could do in seconds, they got tangled up and liked to explode. 

Annette didn’t really mind that, anyway. Explosions were cool, and at least she could kind of do magic. Fiona, according to Jinaya, probably didn’t have a single magical bone in her body. Annette figured that she probably had one. A really, really small one, like a fingerbone. 

Magic fingerbones, now there’s an idea. 

Since he was  _ heavy _ , and she wasn’t exactly the heavy-hitter of the group, Fiona carried the heavy man on her back as they made their way to the other end of the house. 

“So, what’s this naughty old man been doing that has Bettie and Tadalan in such a tizzy? Annette wondered aloud, leading the way back to the office. The two of them walked as briskly as possible, though what with Fiona’s load of deadweight, wasn’t as quickly as any of them would have liked.

“Skimming government funds,” Viola replied in their ears. “Our mole caught the doctored expenditure reports, he’s made copies and everything—all we need is direct proof of his involvement. There’s a slim chance someone is framing him. But if we can get evidence, even tangential evidence, that Shioda’s a corrupt bastard filling his pockets through our suffering? It’s just going to piss off everyone in Nova and maybe even the surrounding towns, destroy his credibility as a military leader, maybe even slow down the army at home.”

“Fun!” chirps Annette. “Stir the pot a little, Viola?”

“By the time we’re done with him, it’s going to be boiling,” Fiona said grimly, and hitched the general a little bit higher on her back. A minute of watchful silence later, the two of them were standing outside Shioda’s office. 

“Moment of truth,” Annette murmured, and touches the tip of the letter opener to the lock. Its form wavers in her hand, rippling and rolling with the magic being drawn back inside, until it looked like a brass key. She pushed it into the lock and turned it.

When the lock clicked open rather than an alarm sounding or her hand being burnt off, both women let out sighs of relief. They walked in and dropped Shioda unceremoniously on the ground before tapping down detection slips all over the office. The man certainly liked nasty surprises. 

“Something odd on the desk, lines are pink and barely expanded at all,” Fiona said tersely. “Same thing on the bookcase,” Annette adds. 

They hear a sharp curse on the other end of the spell. “He’s using something a little more exotic on those,” Viola huffs, “and anything exotic is way past my paygrade. You’re probably not getting into those unless you get him to open them for you himself. I’m guessing from what he said earlier that there’s a Draconian intent spell somehow mixed in there. Unless you want to be bits of shrapnel, don’t touch them.”

Annette blew out a sharp breath. “Alright,” she replied, and began rifling through his unprotected drawers. They were so full that opening them was a struggle involving lots of maneuvering and jiggling and shoving papers back inside. 

The top drawer was full of letters, both opened and unopened, from yesterday as well as two months ago. She started scratching through them, watching for any sender names she recognized. “Anything?” she heard Fiona mutter. 

“Looking,” Annette replied. None of the names were familiar to her as anyone important. Minor corporals in the army, bureaucrats without a prominent family name, his aunt, a captain, another bureaucrat…

Aunt?

“Does Shioda have an aunt?” Annette asked, plucking the worn envelope from the drawer. 

It was Viola who answered. “He’s the last living Shioda, other than his son.”

The redheaded woman sliced open the envelope and pulled out the piece of paper inside. It was folded into thirds, and upon unfolding it, she glanced at the sender. It was signed “Aunt Millie”. 

“Millie Shioda?” she asked. “Millicent, maybe?”

“Doesn’t exist,” Viola replied. “We ran an extensive background check on this man. His parents were only children.”

“No bastards?” Fiona chimed in. 

“None that we know of.”

Annette scanned the letter. The handwriting looped and flourished itself across the pages, the words themselves written in a dark red ink. It mostly spoke about a cat named Reginald, who had gotten fat and probably needed to be looked at.

Fiona came over to look at the letter, scanning it alongside her partner. “Bet you it’s in code,” said Annette. 

Fiona’s smile was sharp and full of teeth. “I wouldn’t take that bet.”

The two of them started looking for more letters from this “Aunt Millie”, and ended up finding five more—all of them discreetly tucked away between other, more important-looking letters. They were all written in the same dark red ink and in similarly worn envelopes, with the same dramatic handwriting and all about Aunt Millie’s relatively banal life. 

Reginald the cat made several appearances, though his health seemed to vacillate between “fit as a spring rabbit” and “more sickly than my sister during the winter months”. And the letters were dated weeks apart. 

“Hurry up, you lot,” Viola said sharply. “I have a feeling we don’t have much longer. Get what we came for and get out. We don’t have a team to watch our backs this time.”

Annette winced at the reminder of their last stealth assignment gone awry. She had accidentally tripped the security system while admiring a cute painting of a dog, and she and Fiona had been chased at least two miles by soldiers before Tadalan’s men came to help them out. In her defense, almost everyone was a sucker for the small and fluffy ones.

“Is this enough?” she asked, deferring to her partner. Fiona narrowed her eyes, considering. “Five minutes,” she said. “Five minutes, take as much as we can, then we get the hell out of here.”

Annette nodded sharply and began furiously shoving letters into a satchel she spotted against the wall. She’d be able to carry it out if she wrapped the straps around herself as she climbed down. 

The five minutes were over in the blink of an eye. “Best exit point?” Fiona asked, her unfocused gaze letting Annette know she was talking to Viola. 

But there was no reply. The slight buzz in her ear that Annette had come to associate with Viola’s magic was gone. 

“Shit,” she breathed, “Viola?”

But there was no reply. 

“New plan,” said her partner, making a quick about-face. “We get to the roof.”

“Right,” said Annette, feeling a spark of worry coil in her gut. The two of them sprinted up the stairs and jimmied the highest window they could find open. Annette followed Fiona as she gripped the edge of the roof and pulled herself onto the shingles. 

It was a matter of minutes before the two of them were standing on the roof, Annette’s worry growing with every second Viola’s voice failed to reassert herself. There were a great many reasons her communications would stop. 

The most plausible was that she had just run out of energy. Spells took a lot of it, or so she was told, and she had ended it to make sure she didn’t get too tired. But that didn’t explain the lack of a verbal warning. 

So maybe Viola had been discovered and was currently in a fight for her life right now, which worried Annette the most. Their partner was a crack shot with a sniper rifle whose accuracy could only really be rivaled by Robin and his compound bow, but in close combat, she often had trouble. Annette couldn’t count the number of times she’d bested Viola in a sparring match, and Fiona was even better than she was. Former assassins tended to have better hand-to-hand skills than street thieves. 

And while she knew Viola wasn’t some sort of delicate flower, she was also on her own without any real backup. 

Annette palmed her knife, taking it from the holster at her side. The blade was wickedly sharp and glinted in the weak moonlight as the two of them prowled through the shadows, scanning for a sign of their erstwhile partner. 

“No sign of her,” Fiona muttered out of the corner of her mouth. She gripped the pistol in her left hand and had her right digging around in her pocket for something. 

The two of them had nearly reached the other side of the roof before Annette heard a tiny shuffling sound. She whipped around to glare at the dark bricks making up the side of a chimney. 

Eyes shone out of the darkness, a bright, clear green. Viola’s eyes. 

Annette tugged Fiona closer to the chimney as she stared at her partner, who was entirely invisible save for her irises. 

“Camo,” Viola whispered, and without argument, Annette dug the single piece of paper labeled “invisibility” from her pocket. She braced her back against the chimney next to her and slapped it on her arm, releasing it with a quiet word. Fiona did the same, and all three of them stood in the shadows, hidden in their invisibility.

Annette’s heart was pounding in her chest. What else was on the roof? She could feel her palms sweating and she tried to take deeper breaths. But if she took deeper breaths, would whoever else there see her chest rising and falling? The camo slips were new. Viola had only learned them yesterday and hadn’t made enough that they could test them out. What if they failed? 

Fiona has a gun, Annette reminded herself, and Viola has her rifle. And she had her knife, and even if she wasn’t as good in a fight as Fiona was, she could certainly hold her own. 

Sometimes she missed the certainty of last year, when she’d lived in the tiny apartment above the flower store. Though her means were always tenuous—thievery is never so sustainable—she always had somewhere to return to, even if it was after a stint in lockup. And she also knew the chances of getting brutally murdered were fairly low. 

And the company hadn’t been bad, she thought. She might have lived right next to the red light district, but the girls there were always nice. 

But she was fighting for something bigger now, for something past just enough to fence for her next meal. Besides, it was more exciting. 

She wondered if Fiona ever reminisced about before, if she missed it at all. Were assassins in high demand? Her job can’t have been easy. 

As for Viola...well. She didn’t like to talk about it, but Annette was pretty sure she wished things hadn’t changed. In her place, she certainly wouldn’t have. 

The seconds crawled by as Annette stood, frozen in place by both fear and design. It could have been a minute or it could have been an hour as she stood there. She began to count her breaths. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. She tried slowing it down to make the rise and fall of her chest less noticeable, but she had to resist the urge to gasp when another person appeared on the roof. They were clad in all black—rookie mistake, she thought hazily—and were of average height. Not particularly thin or fat either.

But they had a gun. 

Her ears, pricked with anxiety, picked up Viola’s sharp intake of breath and the rustle of Fiona’s clothes. The two of them were readying for a fight. 

Annette, instead, forced herself to become stock still. 

The figure came closer, but, backlit as it was against the moonlight, Annette still couldn’t make out any features. It was only when she noticed the limp that it clicked. It was Reynaldi. But what was he doing back here, and on the roof? He had to have seen the corpses in the courtyard. But he hadn’t gone to alert the authorities?

“Come on out,” the man said tiredly. “I sent Gina on a wild goose chase to find a constable when we heard the crashes. You’ll have no trouble from me.”

The three of them still didn’t move, as if by some unspoken consensus. 

Reynaldi let out a put-upon sigh. “Twenty four crows, but none you can see. Thirty two ravens, but only one tree,” he recited, the old passphrase Annette had committed to memory ringing through the still air like the crack of a bell. 

Fiona, next to her, shifted slightly. “And when the wind blows, they all fly away,” she said. 

“They’ll come back to the tree, just some other day,” finished Reynaldi, who holstered his gun. Fiona released her invisibility and Annette and Viola followed suit. 

“Why the hell do you know our passphrase?” Viola snapped. “When I saw you in the courtyard I thought for sure we were screwed.”

“It’s a long story,” Reynaldi muttered. 

“And I have approximately thirty seconds before I shoot you,” Fiona said sharply. Annette’s own nerves were buzzing and she felt like a spring, so tightly coiled that a single nudge would set her off.

“That would be a supremely bad idea,” Renaldi shot back, unimpressed. 

Fiona didn’t reply, only cocked her gun. Annette admired her nerve. In her place, she probably would’ve started talking. The words pushed on her lips, piling up over themselves and trying to spill out. 

“I’m an old friend of Elizabetta,” he said finally, after a second that had stretched out for a year and a day. “She may have mentioned me as her independent consultant.”

Annette had, indeed, heard Bettie talking about her “independent consultant”. She remembered walking through the halls of their main base the day before they left for Degah, where Shioda’s mansion was located, and passing Bettie and Tadalan walking in the opposite direction. They were together as they almost always were in base, planning their next moves and coordinating. Tadalan led the ground forces and handled most of the actual military movements, while Bettie took charge of the espionage, sabotage, and supplies. The two of them co-led the rebellion with the zeal of idealists and the worldviews of pragmatists. 

“They’re going in without backup,” she heard Tadalan say, dark brows furrowed—as usual. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smile. 

“I called an independent consultant,” Bettie replied breezily. Her hair, tight braids twisted into a bun, reflected gold in the late afternoon sun. Tadalan didn’t seem comforted. In fact, Annette had thought his frown grew even more severe. “He’s not exactly…reliable,” he muttered. She didn’t hear Betties reply, because by then she had crossed the threshold into the mess hall and the noise drowned out their conversation.

“ _ You’re  _ Bettie’s consultant?” Annette asked, eyebrows raised. 

“You have everything,” Viola chimed in. Her voice was accusatory. “You’re rich, you’re getting married to one of the most powerful women in the country, and you’re set to be one of the best duelists in the league. Why help a group of rebels in Nova?”

“Bettie’s an old friend,” Reynaldi repeated stubbornly, and tapped his foot. “Are we going to stand on this roof and continue this useless tete-a-tete, or do you want to get out of here before the guards are called?”

“I have plenty of ‘old friends’ in Alizet,” Viola spat, her accent beginning to leak into her words. “They abandoned me long ago. And you’re not even from this country!”

Annette watched Reynaldi’s stance soften slightly, though he kept his dismissive frown. “Neither are you,” he pointed out, eyes lingering on the tiny sigil on her face mask. “Last I heard, the  _ illustrious  _ Bisset family wasn’t from here, either.”

“Dorenon isn’t about to be at war with Alizet. How do we know you’re not just trying to sabotage this country to get Patria a foothold?”

She had a point, Annette thought privately. 

At this, Reynaldi grew cold. “You know nothing about me,” he said, his words quiet. “I’m helping you for my own reasons and for Bettie’s sake.”

The tension in the air prickled along Annette’s skin. The words piling up behind her lips finally beat her resolve and spilled out. “We should get going,” she said, affecting a cheerful tone. “Before Regina Bellmonte gets back, right?”

Reynaldi paled at the mention of his fiance. “Let’s,” he agreed. Annette glanced over at Viola and saw her bristling, eyes narrowed and mouth pressed into a thin line. 

The four of them made their way off the roof. Fiona led the way through the window, hanging off the shingles and making a jump to get back in. Annette came in last, behind Viola. She twisted to make sure Viola’s rifle, strapped to her back, didn’t hit her in the face.

“You coming?” she asked hesitantly, as Reynaldi meandered toward the roof edge. His mouth quirked up into a half-smile. Instead of answering, he ran a hand through his hair, took a breath, and shut his eyes. He took out a slip of paper from his pocket and sandwiched it between his palms. “Lighten,” he said clearly. Annette watched, transfixed as pidery black lines crawled off the paper and over his hands, over his wrists, and under his shirtsleeves. They crept onto his face and into his hair.

Reynaldi’s half-smile widened into a full blown grin, stretching the black lines around his mouth, and he jumped off the roof. Annette stuck her head out of the window, peering down. Reynaldi was hurtling towards the ground headfirst, his hand outstretched and a piece of paper clutched between his fingers. He yelled a word that Annette couldn’t make out, but when he hit the ground, it didn’t seem like a large impact at all. Instead, he tucked into a roll and came back onto his feet. 

“What happened to the limp?” Annette shouted down to the man, finally noting the lack of his cane from earlier. 

He dusted himself off before turning his face up to look at her. “What do you think?” he replied, grinning wider. The black lines disintegrated into ash, falling off his skin as dust. 

She pulled down her mask and stuck her tongue out at him before following Viola and Fiona. 


	3. Ingat

She didn’t trust him, not with her life or those of her teammates. She knew what kind of man Reynaldi was—one of those opportunistic bastards with a finger in every pie, that fancied themselves cleverer than everyone else and really only cared about their own person. She’d encountered enough of his kind. 

In Alizet, before, she had been required to go to meetings with her father as his heir presumptive. With her mother dead and an only child, she was set to inherit his title, his lands, and his business dealings. Men like Reynaldi were a dime a dozen. She remembered sitting in a conference room at the right hand of her father, forced into a green satin dress and heels. The dress was nice, but it crinkled unpleasantly when she tried to move. And she had been in the middle of a really good book when a servant had summoned her out of the library, so she was still miffed. 

There was a man sitting a few chairs down. She would never forget his face—dark hair, cropped close to his skull, and a mean look in his dark eyes. A shiver went up her back and she made herself sit straighter. 

“Leon Reynaldi,” said her father, leaning forward and lacing his fingers under his chin. “I understand you have a proposition for me.” 

It wasn’t a question. Father had taught her not to ask questions of people you negotiated with. Never show weakness to the sharks, and all. 

Leon Reynaldi smiled in the slow, incautious way that a predator smiles when it sees its prey. His teeth were bright in the dim light. 

“And I understand your holdings on the coast are being hassled by Patrian ships. I have certain pull in the government, as you know. I can get them to leave you alone.” His accent was thick, but his words were slow and measured. 

“The Moors are Alizet territory,” her father said sharply. “Patria has no business in the area.”

“On the contrary. The Democratic Republic of the Moorlands,” at this, Reynaldi sneered, “have made it clear that they are a territory of their own. Or are their Alizet saviors little more than overlords?”

“They govern themselves,” Viola’s father allowed. “However, we have diplomatic sanctions in place that lets me have holdings there. Unless my memory fails me, they still have a trade embargo with Patrian merchants.”

“Said diplomatic sanctions do not apply to the drug trade.” Reynaldi leaned back in his chair, eyes glittering. “Do they?”

Viola cut a glance at her father. The man let no unease show on his face and break his composure, but Viola saw his jaw tighten. “They’re perfectly legal, and I have the paperwork to prove it.”

“I’m sure you do,” Reynaldi agreed. “However, the Moors are as anti-magic as my own country. And that extends to magical production, yes? But the dubious legality of your business aside, I have a proposition for you.”

“Enough dancing around, Leon. Out with it.”

The man sighed. “My son, Darian. He’s talented, incredibly so. I had him tested.”

Her father’s gaze grew more intense. “And?”

“He has considerable aptitude for the magical arts. He cannot be taught in Patria, and the universities in Dorenon won’t take Patrian students. There are precious few people I have connections to in Alizet. You are one of them.”

“What would you have me do, in exchange for keeping the Patrians away from my warehouses?”

“Take him in.”

“Excuse me?” her father bit out, sitting back in surprise. “I expected you to ask me to sponsor the boy, let him enroll in one of our universities. But take him in? The son of one of my business rivals? You must be mad, Leon.”

“Or desperate,” the man replied. 

Viola knew that he must be. Only a desperate man at the end of his rope would admit to that at the negotiating table, or a fool. But Leon Reynaldi was the chief exporter of Patrian textiles, and he managed one of the largest trading companies in the region. He was no fool.

She watched in awe as her father squeezed the man dry. The Bisset family would take in his son for as long as it took to put him through one of their top magical universities. In exchange, Leon Reynaldi would use his questionably extensive resources to keep Patrian authorities away from his warehouses on the Moorland coast. He also had to swear an oath not to sabotage any of her father’s future business dealings and provide aid to any Bisset family member, should they ask it of him. 

Viola, a sniper in the present day, knew exactly what kind of man Darian Reynaldi was. She had known him since she was a child. Darian was skilled, handsome, and an incredible duelist even when he was too young for the youth circuits. Three years older than her, she had looked up to him, seen him as a brother. Then he’d gone off to university when he turned seventeen.

She wouldn’t see him again. 

Hopefully he wouldn’t recognize her. The Bisset sigil on her mask was risky, but the rest of her was difficult to see in the dim light. And the last time he had seen her, she was a gangly fourteen-year-old in a puffy red dress—a far cry from the woman she was now. 

Viola was suddenly glad that she had worn her mask. The Shioda job had supposed to have been a quick raid, in and out, with little chance of enemy engagement. 

“Why is he here?” Viola hissed to Annette. The other woman shrugged, auburn hair frizzy in the dry air. “I guess he’s our backup if things go even worse,” she replied. The party of four had made it to the grounds of the mansion and onto the bristling lawn. They’d come in by hitching a ride with one of Bettie’s merchant contacts, but they’d been left to their own devices to get back to base. 

“Nova is too far to get in a single night, considering getting here took us three. But we need to get as far away as possible before sunrise,” said Fiona. Reynaldi nodded. “Bettie has a friend with a safe house who would be willing to house you. He’s a little over three miles away, an hour and a half if we walk quickly.”

“Brilliant,” Viola muttered, and adjusted her rifle over her shoulders to sit more comfortably on her back. 

The four of them walked in silence, Viola’s sniper kit bumping her with every step. It felt like an age in the tense quiet, Reynaldi’s presence a constant, niggling annoyance. They were about two miles in on the long, meandering path when he stopped by a bend in the road, a copse of trees hiding the other side. 

“What is it?” Fiona asked, her voice low. Reynaldi’s hand came to rest on the pistol at his hip. “Someone’s coming up the path,” he whispered, “They just tripped my alerts.” 

Viola glanced around, seeing only bare fields. The land was flat for miles, and there was no cover to hide behind. She’d only had the three invisibility tags, which she cursed herself for. 

“You need to let me shoot you,” Reynaldi said. 

Fiona lifted a single eyebrow, arms crossed. 

“Yes, I realize how that sounds,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. “But they’re made of rubber and they have a similar invisibility matrix to your ninja friend’s.”

Ninja— Viola huffed. 

“That’s wildly inconvenient,” Fiona deadpanned.

“They’re made for long range!” he snapped, indignant. “I swear on my life they’re only invisibility.” 

Annette bounced in front of Reynaldi and spread her arms wide. “I trust you,” she said, beaming at him. Viola wondered if Fiona could see the strain around her eyes. She probably could—that woman had eyes like a hawk. 

Reynaldi nodded once, took the gun out of its holster, and loaded it with a bullet from his pouch. He shot Annette in the chest, who winced. But true to his word, the rubber bullet only released a black matrix of lines and symbols that crawled over her skin. She made a face. “Itchy,” she muttered with a pout, before the lines encroached over her nose and she blinked out of sight. Fiona noticeably loosened her white knuckled grip on her pistol, and Viola let out a heavy sigh. “Do it,” her leader said quietly. 

Reynaldi shot the two of them in quick succession, reloaded, and shot himself. They waited in silence as people started coming up the path. One of them was a man, with bright ginger hair. The other was a young boy, just entering his teen years, with hair the same color. Relatives, Viola surmised, and judged from the quality of their homespun clothes that they were either poor merchants or farmers.

“I heard gunshots,” said the older man. His hand twitched as his gaze scanned the upcoming road and surrounding countryside. He gnawed on his lip. 

“They sounded more like popping noises than gunshots,” the boy replied, rolling his eyes. 

“That’s what gunshots sound like,” he snapped.

“No, it’s not.”

“And how would you know?” the man asked. He crossed his arms, looking at the kid expectantly. 

“Norman’s dad lets him play with his, and he showed it to me,” he said stubbornly. “Those sounded like actual small explosions.”

The man sighed. “Norman’s dad shouldn’t be letting him do that,” he grumbled. “That's wicked dangerous.”

“There’s no one here, anyway,” the boy said, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “No one for miles and miles.”

The man let out a noncommittal grunt and began to walk, passing the copse of trees where Viola stood. She held her breath. 

They kept walking. 

A gust of wind blew past them, shaking the leaves on the trees and rattling the loose tie on her sniper kit. A metallic  _ clink  _ shot through the still night. 

Viola’s heart leapt into her throat as the two travelers stopped and looked around again. She was forcibly reminded of playing hide-and-seek as a child, when the slightest sound would give her away. The tap of a heeled shoe against a bedpost, or maybe the brush of her hair against the wood of a cabinet. Her governess had the sharpest ears out of anyone she knew, then and now. She’d hear her breathing if it was just a smidge too loud or the scratch of her dress. 

Standing perfectly still so her clothes wouldn’t rustle, she took a deep, slow breath. “Must’ve been the wind,” the man muttered. The boy began to walk again. “Nobody comes out here anyway, Pa. C’mon.” 

The four of them remained frozen for long minutes after that, watching as the two peasants rounded another turn in the path. Viola heard a muttered command and Reynaldi shimmered into view. He tapped her on the shoulder, murmured under his breath, and the black lines blew off of her dark skin like ash. She could see herself again. The process was repeated as Reynaldi released the invisibility matrices concealing Fiona and Annette. The latter shook herself, auburn hair bouncing, and grinned. “That was a close call,” she chirped. 

“Too close,” Fiona muttered. “I don’t like to kill civilians.”

“That implies you have,” Reynaldi pointed out. In reply, Fiona narrowed her eyes in a dangerous glare. “It’s not something I brag about,” she said, after a tense silence had passed. 

Reynaldi nodded, holstering his gun. The four of them began to walk at a fast clip once more. Just as the sun peeked over the edge of the horizon, bathing the valley in pre-dawn light, they came upon a small house. It had a thatched roof and brick walls, with a chicken coop beside it. Tilled fields stretched out beyond, ready for planting. Reynaldi walked right up to the door and knocked. Three quick knocks, a pause, and then two more. Then he started whistling.

It was a tune Viola recognized from Alizet. Their national anthem was well-known by the citizenry, but the one Reynaldi had picked was a sailors’ rhyme they taught their children. 

She remembered the lyrics, too. 

_ Begone ye fears of foreign waters _

_ Begone ye fears of tales untold.  _

_ The albatross will never falter,  _

_ Until you’ve found the pirate’s gold. _

Silly, short, and sweet, perfect for entertaining classes of young kids. But it wasn’t sung outside of her country. She hadn’t heard it in years. 

As the tune began to wind down, Reynaldi reaching the end of the first verse, the door creaked. Viola’s hand flew to the pocketknife she kept at her hip, and she saw both of her companions also reach for their weapons. 

But the person who opened the door looked about as non threatening as they came. An old, bent-over woman braced herself on the door handle and smiled up at Reynaldi. “Darian,” she croaked. “You’ve brought the packages?”

He smiled back at her, the same smile Viola recalled from her youth, oozing charm and self-assuredness. “Right here, Miss Laura. Hope you don’t mind if I can’t stick around. Gina will be looking for me.”

“Of course not, best not to keep her waiting. I will see you sometime else?” Her milky eyes shone in the dim light, and with a start, Viola realized that the old woman—Miss Laura—was blind. 

“If all goes well,” he promised. He turned to the three women behind him. “Tell Bettie I did my bit,” he said. “She knows how to contact me if she needs me.” And with those parting words, he trotted off the stoop and down the lane. Neither Fiona nor Viola had much to say to him at all, but Annette perked up. “Goodbye, and thank you!” she called. 

Instead of turning around and replying, Reynaldi lifted a hand and waved. 

“Snob,” Viola muttered. 

“What was that?” asked Miss Laura, frowning. 

“Nothing,” she said hastily, ignoring Annette’s giggle and the amused twist to Fiona’s mouth. 

The old woman ushered them inside and sat them at her table, fussing with her faded pink apron. “Robins are my favorite birds,” she said abruptly. 

“And yet yesterday, I heard the kingfisher,” Fiona replied, her voice quiet. Miss Laura nodded once, sharply. She ran her fingers over her wooden countertop. Viola noticed with a start that there were little holes in the wood, carved in specific patterns. Miss Laura picked up the kettle on the stove, seemingly out of muscle memory, and put it on her counter. She reached upwards, pulled open the cabinet above her, and took down four mugs. 

“Do you need help?” Annette asked, bouncing to her feet. 

“Thank you, but no,” said Miss Laura, not unkindly. The old woman ran her fingers over her cabinet doors, opened one, and reached inside. She pulled out a tin and set it on the counter as Viola watched with rapt attention. She opened a drawer to her left and nimbly picked out a small spoon, then opened the tin. She put a spoonful of tea leaves into each mug and poured in the water with her other hand. 

She carried each mug to the table and put them in the center of the table. “I don’t quite trust myself to put them in front of you without tripping,” she said, somewhat apologetically.

“Thank you!” Annette chirped, and picked up the mug. She took a sip. “Ow.”

“Thank you,” said Fiona quietly, cutting a glance at the redhead. “It’s hot,” she deadpanned. 

Annette made a face, sticking out her tongue. “It’s hot,” she mocked, affecting a monotone voice. 

Despite herself, Viola burst out laughing. “I just shot five people trying to enter the Shioda mansion,” she gasped, “and you—” She couldn’t continue. She was laughing too hard.

Annette’s smile dropped. “Viola,” she said. 

Viola didn’t respond. She was laughing, she was crying, she was choking on air and her own tongue and her head hurt. She’d shot five people. Six bullets came out of her sniper rifle, her hands gripping the cold metal as she aimed and fired. She could feel the rough shingles of the roof digging into her skin now. The recoil after each shot would cause her to jolt slightly.

Headshot. Headshot. Bullet to the chest. Headshot. Bullet to the leg and one to the chest—the last woman, a servant woman, had been rather nimble on her feet. 

_ Nimble on her feet _ . How callous could she be? That woman probably had a family, had parents who loved her or a spouse waiting for her to come home. And she’d  _ shot _ her, she’d left her cooling corpse bleeding onto Shioda’s expensive cobblestones. 

She dimly registered a pair of soft arms around her. Annette had leapt out of her chair and draped herself around Viola, holding her tightly. Her fingers, long and thin, pressed insistently. “Breathe,” Annette murmured in her ear and pressed her face into the side of Viola’s. “Breathe.”

Viola took a shuddering breath, then another. Annette’s auburn waves tickled her nose.

“In and out,” Annette said.

She breathed. She remembered who taught her to shoot, dimly. Her father had always been fond of hunting in the woods behind the family home. Some days, his friends were too busy to come with him. He would look at his daughter, too young to be a lady but too old to be a child, and gesture for her to follow. She’d trail after him into the woods with her skirts hiked to her knees. 

They would walk quietly the deeper they got into the trees. Her father would lay on the ground behind bushes, still and silent. She would copy him. He would set up his rifle, waiting, and she would wait beside him doing her best not to make a sound. The shock of the gun going off would be immense. It would shatter the sunlit peace and birds would chatter as they took off, rustling the leaves as they went, and a little ways off Viola would look at what her father had killed. Once it had been a deer. Breathtakingly beautiful even in death, it had lay in the grass and detritus with blood gushing from a hole in its neck. 

The trip after that, her father had pressed the rifle into her hands and taught her how to use it. Her first kill was a rabbit, and she remembered only feeling a hazy sort of remorse afterward. And here she was now, using what her father had taught her to send bullets through people instead of bunnies and deer. 

Viola didn’t realize that she had stopped hyperventilating until she opened her eyes. Annette hovered in front of her, concern writ in the lines of her face. “Alright?” she asked cautiously, holding Viola’s shoulders loosely. 

“Alright,” Viola agreed hoarsely. Annette gave one sharp nod and gave one last squeeze before sitting back in her own chair. 

“Drink your tea, Viola,” said the third member of their party. At 25, Fiona was the oldest and the team leader. But she looked decades older, back ramrod straight and sipping her tea with the sort of rigid control and discipline that was usually beaten into someone. Her own visage was terrifying blank. Viola knew, regardless, that her captain was worried. While Fiona could never be described as effusive the way Annette would be, she only shut off all of her expressions when she was thinking hard. That particular quirk of hers hadn’t been easy to learn. But Viola had run enough missions with the taciturn woman to know that she cared. 

Miss Laura’s small, wrinkly hand reached across the table. “Give me your hand, dear,” she said. Viola did, and Miss Laura grasped it with a surprisingly ironclad grip. “You are good,” she said, staring straight ahead. Viola couldn’t seem to meet her eyes. “You are good,” she repeated. “And brave, and you are doing what you must.”

It was too much. The lump in Viola’s throat was back with a vengeance, and tears welled up in her eyes. They poured down her cheeks before she could stop them, wet, fat things, dampening the scarred wood of the table. 

She barely heard Fiona quietly excuse herself before Annette had jumped out of her chair again and wrapped herself around Viola tightly. “She’s right,” said Annette, and all she could do was cry harder.


	4. Au Revoir

It wasn’t right. It really wasn’t.

Fiona had made her way into what she assumed was Miss Laura’s living room after opening a door from the kitchen. She hoped the blind woman wouldn’t mind. As she walked inside, she glanced around. Miss Laura’s living room was full to bursting with different colors and textures, all butted up next to each other like the stilt houses of her childhood. Her plush couch looked as if one would sink into it, and the bright orange knitted blanket looked equally as cozy. There was a woven basket of yarn placed next to the smooth wooden table, with two knitting needles jammed haphazardly into a dark green ball. Fiona took the riotous mass of clashing colors in with a half-smile. 

Inadvertently, her thoughts turned to Viola, and she grit her teeth. Too young. Viola was entirely too young. A woman of 17, no, a  _ girl  _ of 17 should be worrying about friends and school and finding her place in the world. Not worrying about the eternal damnation of her soul from shooting six innocent people, all for a war she shouldn’t, by all rights, be a part of. As much as she may bristle when it’s brought up, Viola was Alizet nobility through and through. 

She didn’t condemn Viola for it, of course. She had no more control over where she was born than Fiona did. The fact remained that the teenager had gotten herself involved in a different country’s war. Tadalan had expressed that particular concern when Viola first joined. She distinctly remembered an uncomfortable meeting in the sweltering heat of summer where she’d sat in a fuzzy office chair, trying desperately to look composed instead of sweaty. “Is that such a good idea?” Tadalan had asked, though the question was more directed to Bettie. He glanced at her, and Fiona tried to seem attentive. “You have the final decision, after all. The girl would be joining your half.”

Bettie, brown hair pulled into a sensible braided updo, tapped her chin with a delicate white finger. “She’s not Dorene, yes,” she mused. “But she would be a valuable asset.”

Tadalan had raised an eyebrow then. “Valuable? He asked. “She’s incapable of hand to hand combat!”

It was true. Fiona had found Viola in the densest part of the Dorene marshes on a supply run. She’d been wearing this tattered green dress, though it was more brown than green by then. Viola was trying to fend off two men in dark, ragged clothes. Fiona supposed they were brigands who had picked her as an easy mark. One of the men had her in a headlock and hadn’t broken a swear. 

“Do remember that fighting ability, while useful, isn’t all that wins a war,” Bettie replied drily. “She has much more than that. A blue-blooded woman of Alizet ancestry, fighting on our side? She offers an outsider’s perspective. And if her fieldwork is lacking, she would be useful as propaganda. It was the republic who killed her father, after all.”

Tadalan huffed. “She could also be a pain to deal with,” he pointed out. At that moment, Fiona had been unable to keep her mouth shut. “She deserves the chance,” she said. “As you say, the republic’s brutes murdered her last living relative. She deserves a chance at revenge.” Her mouth quirked up, and she added, “If we didn’t take her in, she would go after them herself. With a butter knife, if need be.”

Bettie raised an eyebrow. “A butter knife?”

Fiona nodded. “A butter knife. She has spirit enough.” She had, after all, tried to bite the brigand’s arm. 

Bettie nodded back. “It’s settled, then. She’ll be in your unit, Fiona.” 

Fiona had expected that. After Nathan had quit fieldwork to work in their intelligence office, her three-man cell had been missing a member. She was the heavy hitter and Annette, the specialist. They needed someone for long range support, and Viola had mentioned that she knew her way around a gun. “I’ll introduce her to Robin,” said Fiona. 

“See to it that you do,” Tadalan muttered, already getting sucked back into the morass of paperwork on his desk. Poor man was always moaning that he’d die from the papercuts. 

The back of her neck prickled, and Fiona swung around. In the doorway stood Miss Laura, who Fiona hasn’t heard coming at all. “Your subordinate is fine,” said the old woman quietly. She shuffled a few steps further into the room and leaned against the wall. “How old is she?”

“Seventeen,” Fiona replied, trying not to clench her teeth. 

The old woman nodded. “What happened to her?” she asked. “Her accent isn’t Dorene. Not Patrian either. Alizet or the Moors, I’d assume.”

“Alizet,” she confirmed, crossing her arms. “As far as I know, her father was assassinated by agents in the Dorene government.” 

Miss Laura’s bushy white eyebrows shot up. “What on earth did he do to warrant that?”

Fiona shrugged and quickly realized that Miss Laura couldn’t see. “She says she doesn’t know. If she does, she isn’t saying.”

The old woman made a humming noise under her breath. “And your other subordinate. She sounds young.” 

Fiona sighed. “Annette’s age varies by the day if you ask her. The straightest answer I’ve managed to get out of her is that she’s somewhere in the realm of her early twenties.”

“And you?”

“Twenty five laps around the sun,” she said. 

“You are all too young,” Miss Laura huffed, echoing Fiona’s thoughts from earlier. “Far too young to be fighting a war.”

“We’re fighting for our people,” Fiona said sharply. “Fighting for our futures.”

“What good is that if you don’t have one?” Miss Laura said. Her knobbly hands gestured wildly. “I’ve told Darian a million times. The stress will kill the poor man someday, and someday soon, if he continues as he is. And you three aren’t the first Nova kids dropped on my doorstep.”

“You volunteered to run this safe house,” Fiona pointed out.

“I did,” she said. “I did, and I’ve never regretted it. But each batch that crosses my threshold seems to get younger by the day. Just last week, a teenage boy. And the week before that, two young men and a woman. Are all of Elizabetta’s recruits children?”

“We must all be children to you,” Fiona tried to joke, but Miss Laura shook her head. “Elizabetta is a good woman,” she said. “Only met her the once, but I could feel her conviction. But she recruits young, as leaders do, and I fear she will have an entire generation of lost children if she wins her war.”

“Our war.”

“Our war,” Miss Laura agreed, and let out a gusty sigh. “For all of our sakes, I hope it ends soon.”

“At Tadalan’s projected rates?” said Viola, who had suddenly come to stand in the doorway. “The end’s not exactly in sight.”

Fiona gave the girl a once over. She looked more composed, if with red eyes. “We can hope,” she replied. Viola’s answering smile was tight. “Sure,” she murmured, before turning around and leaving the living room. Fiona bit the inside of her cheek. It was a nervous habit she hadn’t ever seemed to shake. 

Miss Laura sighed again. “There’s a bedroom upstairs,” she said. “Make yourselves at home, alright?”

Fiona nodded, winced, and opened her mouth. “Thank you,” she said. “We’ll be gone by midday tomorrow.” After the old woman nodded back, she, too, left the living room and back into the kitchen. From there, she could see another door. Behind it was a cramped staircase. She made her way up, hand drifting mindlessly across the wall. There were two doors at the top of the staircase. One was locked—Miss Laura’s room, she guessed. The other swung open when she tried the knob. Inside was a bedroom, with a large bed and enough floorspace to put a blanket and a pillow. Indeed, there was a dark red blanket on the small desk in the corner. 

She heard faint footsteps from behind her and turned to see Annette making her way up the stairs, one hand tucked into a pocket. She came in with a loud yawn. “We okayed to sleep here?” she asked, surveying the room. 

“I’ll take the floor,” Fiona said. Annette smiled. “Best captain ever,” she said, with feeling, and dropped face first onto the bed. She let out a long, gratuitous groan of delight. “I’m just so tired.”

“Aren’t we all,” Fiona said, crossing the room to the blanket. She unfolded it and draped it onto the floor. “Pass one of those pillows, will you,” she said to the dead body on the bed. 

Annette let out a disgruntled noise before blindly groping the bed for a pillow. Questing fingers eventually found one and dropped it onto Fiona’s face. 

“Thanks,” she said dryly. 

“Anytime!” Annette chirped. 

Fiona kicked off her boots and followed Annette’s example by laying flat on her face. The two of them just lay there, soaking in the relief of finally being horizontal after what had been a long day of travel and a sleepless night of high stakes. 

“Is Viola right?” Annette asked abruptly, her voice muffled by the bed. 

“‘Bout what?” 

“The war. It not ending soon, and all.”

Fiona allowed herself a sigh. “Probably,” she admitted, and rolled onto her back. The ceiling rafters were brown and higher than she’d expected. “Do you know anything about the last three uprisings?” she asked. 

“Not really.”

“The first was a couple decades ago, also in Nova. Workers went on strike after a long period of little rain and when the President sent soldiers, there was rioting in the streets.”

“Sounds like fun.”

Fiona let out a huff. “It only lasted a week before they were all shot down. The second was south of here, a bunch of dissatisfied monarchists. The old, old,  _ old  _ guard. That lasted a few days and didn’t amount to much violence.”

“Less fun,” said Annette.

“Definitely. The third, which was six years ago, would change everything.”

“Yeah?”

“It started in the capital.”

“Ooh,” Annette said, and twisted so she was hanging off the edge of the bed and looking at Fiona. “Who started it?”

“The President’s son,” Fiona replied, a smile tugging at her mouth. “He got his hands on some faulty spells and blew up a government office building.”

“He wouldn’t have liked that at all.” Annette was grinning, the smile curling her lips until she had the eminently satisfied look of a cat who’d killed a particularly pesky bird.

“No,” she agreed. “There was a warrant for his arrest out within minutes of the explosion, so some people speculate he’d known what he was about to do. Anyway, the city guard must’ve chased that man up and down the length of the capital. He didn’t want to be caught, and they didn’t want to catch him.”

“Tha last part can’t have been in any official reports,” Annette mused. 

“No, but it’s common knowledge. The search couldn’t have gone on so long with the sheer amount of setbacks it did without some insubordination among the guard. He’d worked with them before and they knew him, and evidently liked him enough to commit some treason on the side.”

“That sounds less like an uprising and more like a chase.”

“It was a chase at the start, but then more and more of the city turned on the President. A couple riots in the slums later and the whole city was an inferno of violence.”

Annette whistled. “Six years ago, I was a teenager in Monjene. We didn’t hear about any of this.”

“The President carefully controlled the news going in and out of the city. He feared that if news of the rebellion spread, it would set Dorenon aflame.”

“He was probably right.”

“Mm. Regardless, the son was found and apprehended, then put to the death a week later. His movement never got enough momentum to continue after his very public hanging.”

“What did he expect to gain?” Annette asked. 

“A different President, an end to corruption...the usual, I think, when it comes to revolution. He was very charismatic and the people loved him. He was also Tadalan’s best friend.”

Annette hummed. “So that’s why….”

Fiona nodded. “That’s why.”

“You were there, weren’t you?” said Annette, a sharp glint in her eye. “You were there in the capital.” Fiona’s grin stretched from ear to ear. “I was in the city guard at the time. I personally got Vitor out of trouble once. The idiot was sprinting across the square in broad daylight and when my patrol saw him, I was the one chasing. Ended up ‘spraining’ my ankle near the well and let him get away.”

Annette laughed. “Sounds like something you would do,” she said fondly. 

They lay in companionable silence for a minute more before Fiona heard Annette start to snore. With a grimace, she realized she should probably get some sleep. It would be a long day of walking and begging rides to get back to base the next morning.

When she awoke an indeterminable amount of time later, Fiona’s senses were on high alert. She hadn’t had the luxury of waking up slowly in years, so she was used to snapping straight out of unconsciousness. Something was wrong. 

Moonlight streamed in through the window and the winking stars seemed to taunt her. Fiona pricked her ears, listening hard for any disturbances. All she could hear was Annette’s soft snores and the slow, deep breathing of Viola, who had joined Annette on the bed sometime after she had fallen asleep. Fiona couldn’t hear footsteps, shuffling or otherwise, or the sound of rustling clothes. But something had woken her. 

Quietly, she swung up into a sitting position and glanced around the room. Everything was as expected and nothing had changed from before, but for the addition of Viola’s rifle and bag on the side of the room. With padding steps, she made her way to the bag and checked that Shioda’s documents were still in there. They were, safe and secure. As an extra precaution, Fiona took them out of the bag and pushed them between the mattress and the hard frame of the bed. Just in case, she thought to herself. Those documents were more important than any of them right now. They could change the tide of the war if her hunch was right. 

Fiona strapped her belt pouches to her hip and drew one of her knives in her right hand. Silently, she crept into the hallway. No lights were lit and the place was bathed in shadow. She felt so incredibly tired. She’d been up for around 36 hours and exhaustion was beginning to wear on her, settling in her shoulders and her neck, and making her grip loser than she would like. If this was nothing, she wouldn’t wake her teammates. They were unaccustomed to going long nights without rest and needed it far more than she did. 

Down the stairs she went, telling herself to stay awake. She gripped her knife harder and let the grooves dig into her calloused palm. It was enough to keep her focused, if barely.

At the bottom of the stairs she waited, balancing on the balls of her feet, for a sound. Just one would be enough to confirm her suspicions.

Then she heard a yell from upstairs. Cursing, she sprinted back up, her knife brandished in front of her, and skidded through the door of their room. A figure in dark clothes brandished a pistol at Annette. As Fiona came barrelling in, the figure turned slightly in surprise. Fiona tackled them, bringing them to the floor and knocking away the pistol. Viola rolled out of bed, eyes blank, and picked up the gun. The sound of it cocking made the figure freeze as Fiona wrestled them into a hold. 

“Who the hell are you,” Viola spat, staring down the barrel at the figure. 

The figure didn’t answer, so with a huff of impatience, Annette walked over, then yanked off their mask and hood. The face she uncovered was unfamiliar. A young man glared up at the three of them with ice blue eyes. He had dark hair and dark skin and a simple tattoo of a bird on his temple. Viola sucked in a breath. “Lark,” she hissed.

Fiona raised an eyebrow and looked at Viola, whose normally expressive face was set in hard lines. “The Dorene government likes to hire out people for their dirty jobs. Lark happens to be one of the organizations that takes them.”

Fiona nodded, understanding. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” Viola spat, coming closer with the pistol. 

The man only stared up at her, looking her up and down. His gaze caught on the Bisset family crest on her shirt—a while lily. His mouth curved into a smile as realization flashed in his flat eyes. “I had no idea,” he replied, “that the Bisset girl we failed to kill was here.” He lunged for Viola, snapping his teeth like a mad dog. She backed up a step. Fiona only tightened her hold. 

“Who sent you,” she asked, feeling the strain, and glanced at Annette. “There’s rope in Viola’s bag.”

Annette nodded, grabbed the rope, and began to tie up the Lark operative, who only laughed. “Nobody,” he replied. “Nobody at all.”

“What’s your life worth?” Fiona asked then. 

“Nothing,” he said. Fiona nodded grimly and let Annette tie him up, stuffing a spare bit of cloth from her pack into his mouth. She walked out of the room and onto the landing, cocking her head for the other two to follow. The three women stood at the top of the stairs. 

Fiona gave her soldiers a once-over. The glaze of sleep had left Annette and Viola unsteady and twitching with the need to move, to fight, to do  _ something.  _ Annette’s own eyes were flat and blank. She hadn’t been able to put on the cotton fluff of affected cheer in time. And Viola….

Viola’s features, usually calm and sophisticated and controlled, products of an upbringing Fiona herself was unfamiliar with, were twisted into a rictus of anger and fear. The girl was furious, rightfully so, though Fiona didn’t know the specifics about what had happened to her family. “I want him dead,” she hissed, fingers flexing. 

Annette didn’t speak, choosing to cut that shark-like stare of hers to Fiona. “You were just sobbing over killing five people,” she chose to say. Perhaps it wasn’t the most diplomatic statement she could’ve made, but Viola’s emotions were riding high.

“Innocents,” Viola shot back. “I killed five innocents. That man is not.”

“And who are we to decide who is innocent and who isn’t?” Fiona asked. 

“He’s a killer.”

“So are we.”

Viola let out a sound of inarticulate fury. “He killed my father,” she said, jaw clenched tight. “Maybe not him specifically, but his organization did.”

“Not his organization,” Fiona corrected, “this government. You know that as well as I do.”

“He tried to kill us,” Annette said quietly, leaning against the wall. “And all of us know we can’t let him go, not when he knows we’re here.”

Fiona glanced back at him. “His whole organization knows we’re here,” she said dispassionately. “They had to, to have sent him. Killing him won’t solve the problem at hand. Which is…?”

Viola, sharp as ever, realized first. “Miss Laura,” she murmured, the tight lines of her face relaxing somewhat into something like horror.

Annette pressed her lips together in silent frustration.

“Exactly,” Fiona agreed. 

Quick as a whip, Annette detached herself from the wall to knock on Miss Laura’s door. Fiona watched as she waited for a reply and, getting none, twisted the doorknob and pushed it open. She disappeared into the room. 

Fiona heard a loud curse and let out a long, slow breath, steadying herself for what was to come. So she had been right, and as usual, she wished she hadn’t. 

Viola had bolted into the room while Fiona collected herself. There was no curse or scream, but when she finally entered Miss Laura’s bedroom, she saw her on her knees by the bed, hands pressed to her mouth. The old woman lay on her quilted covers, sightless eyes closed. She could have been sleeping, if not for the violent slash of red across her neck and the dark blood soaking into her beddings. 

“I woke up too late,” said Fiona, walking over to the body. The sight of a corpse in a bed, drenched in blood, was a familiar one. She’d been the cause of it enough times to have long been desensitized to the image. Annette, who had lived on the streets longer than Fiona had been an assassin, would have been used to it too. It was the third member of their cadre of sinners that she was worried about. 

“They killed her first,” Viola said faintly. Her hands fell from her mouth as she reached over to grasp the dead woman’s hand. “No witnesses. No surprises. The easy target.”

Fiona chose not to reply, watching the young woman. Viola took a deep breath, exhaled, squeezed Miss Laura’s frail hands. “We need to leave,” she said after a moment. “If they know we’re here, we need to leave.”

“And the prisoner?” Annette asked. 

“Leave him,” said Fiona. “We don’t have the time.” It was not strictly true. One slash was all it would take, and an enemy dead was far better than one at their backs. But one look at Viola’s face told her that she couldn’t let another death weigh on her conscience, not tonight. “Far too young,” Miss Laura’s voice echoed in her mind, and Fiona let sentiment win. If she could not preserve Viola’s innocence the way hers, too, had been forcibly taken, then she would give the girl this. 

The three women left the room in silence and grabbed their bags, leaving the Lark operative on the floor of the bedroom. They were out the door minutes later after having taken some of Miss Laura’s food. Viola had hesitated over it, but Annette reminded her that food was food and it’s not like she needed it. The statement had been enough for Viola’s mouth to turn down at the corners and her hands to ball into fists. But she had nodded and taken two apples and a packet of dried meat from Miss Laura’s pantry, stuffing them into her pack as she hoisted her rifle kit up her shoulder. 

“It’s a long walk ahead,” Annette murmured, looking out onto the moon-drenched road. 

“Nothing for it,” Fiona replied. She started walking, gaze on the horizon. The pale flush of dawn had touched the sky, which had begun to brighten. The air was still and all was quiet. No songbirds took up the duty of announcing the morning, not yet. In the liminal space between night and day, Fiona gave herself a minute. One minute, for all the feelings she could not allow herself to feel. 

When the minute was over—sixty beats of her heart—she closed her eyes for a split second longer than strictly necessary for a blink. Then she opened her eyes once more to face the slowly rising sun.


	5. Adios

“Fiona,” Annette said. The dark-haired, severe woman turned to face her. Her dark eyes seemed to swallow up all the light, like the lake beside the city Annette had grown up in. It glittered during the daytime, especially at noon, but at night she could probably have stumbled in and drowned if she wasn’t being careful. Fiona’s eyes drew her in the same way.

She didn’t exactly remember the city of her childhood with fond memories. It had been a hard place to live, all jumbled bricks and stone and the unfeeling eyes of people passing by. Most nights were long and cold. Even if she  _ had _ spent most of her life under the tiled roofs and faded awnings of Monjene, it hadn’t been home. More like a stopping place on her way to somewhere else.

Annette didn’t know where the “somewhere else” was, but she felt the pull. It was like a butterfly beating its wings in her chest. An itch, quiet and subtle, but  _ there _ , and she couldn’t ignore it. When it had gotten too strong, she’d left the city by hiding in a merchant’s caravan for a few days. She’d tumbled out and found herself, quite literally, on Tadalan’s porch. 

“And who might you be?” the man had asked, a figure bedecked in bright greens and golds. He was the brightest man Annette had ever seen and she’d stared up at him taking in the auburn mustache and ponytail. “We’ve got the same hair!” she exclaimed, nothing else coming to mind. His big, furry eyebrows had twitched. “I can see that,” he replied, and helped her up from where she was sprawled on the cobblestones. 

“I’m Annette,” she said, beaming up at him. His own mouth pulled up in an answering grin. “Tadalan Winterfell,” he’d replied. “No surname, Annette?”

“Nah.”

Winterfell—because he’d only been Winterfell then, not Tadalan and certainly not  _ commander _ —had raised one of his caterpillar eyebrows at her. “What the hell are you doing with my wallet?”

Annette had frozen, a curse on her tongue. “Whatever do you mean?” she asked smoothly, and tucked the wallet back into his pocket. 

Tadalan glanced at his pocket, no sign of Annette’s pale and spindly fingers nearby at all. She’d moved her hand, obviously. She wasn’t some sort of amateur. 

Instead of getting angry, like she’d expected, he’d laughed. And it was a nice laugh, the kind that made you trust a person instead of thinking they were pretentious or fake. “Bettie would like you,” he replied, and laughed again.

“Who’s Bettie?” Annette asked. Winterfell’s smile was soft and unassuming. It made her wary, because while the way his eyes crinkled was real, the smile was not. She wondered if he would prefer to bare his teeth like a wolf. But then, she wouldn’t have gone with him if he had. “A friend of mine. Would you like to meet her?”

And she’d shrugged, said why not, and gone with him to the teahouse down the road. She’d barely noticed that the itch in her chest eased as she walked, as if she was on the way to where she was  _ supposed  _ to be. 

Now, standing beside two women she greatly admired, the butterfly was mostly still. It only fluttered its wings slightly. 

“Where are we?” she asked Fiona. 

“Adjak,” she replied. “I’ll get us a room at an inn. We look incredibly suspicious, but I’ve got enough money that I can probably persuade the innkeeper to look the other way. Tonight, we go as fast as possible back to Nova.”

Viola was silent, as she had been since they’d left the old woman’s house. Annette worried about her. She wasn’t fragile by any sense of the word, but there was an innocence to her that life hadn’t managed to destroy yet. Annette wasn’t much older, to be fair, but she still  _ knew  _ things. But she didn’t feel them as deeply as Viola did. 

Though what did Annette know about innocence, anyway?

She didn’t know much about Viola, certainly, considering she largely refrained from talking about her past. But Annette knew Viola was different from Fiona and her. Things that she and Fiona were used to, by sheer virtue of having seen them over and over again in a thousand different ways were things that Viola was, on some level, horrified by. And yet she kept going. The girl was brave beyond belief. 

Braver than her, probably. 

She trailed long behind Fiona as she led the way into the middle of the town. The streets were dusty but paved and wide enough to allow two carts to pass by one another. She did try to keep her rubbernecking to a minimum, though she’d never been to Adjak, or to any towns besides Monjene and Nova. This place was different. It was smaller, more contained. 

Vendors were just starting to set up their booths along the street, advertising street food and produce and little knickknacks. But mostly, their wares were useful things, rather than handicrafts meant to attract rich visitors. Monjene hadn’t had many, what with mostly being a merchant town rather than a place with attractions. But Nova, with its sprawling roads and tall buildings, had plenty. 

But it wasn’t the vendors’ stalls that really interested Annette. It was the people.

She’d found that different places had different people. The fishermen and sellers of Monjene had baked brown in the sun and had weathered, craggy faces. They smiled little and laughed even less. They walked around with a stoop to their shoulders, like they carried the weight of the world on their backs.

People in Nova were strange. Those she had grown up around were taciturn and gruff, sure, but they were strong and steady, and there was enough of that steadiness in her. 

But in Nova, they kept their heads down. Not out of weariness or exhaustion, but out of something else. To Annette, it looked like fear. To Tadalan, he said it looked like caution. Everyone in Nova had secrets, mostly knowledge left for too long in the dark. Tadalan was no different—Nova was his town, after all, and had been since he was young. 

Annette had never been to the capital, a city named Aurezya on the banks of a river. Bettie was from there, though. And Bettie was  _ bright _ , in an intellectual sense but also in the way her personality could expand to fill a room. When Elizabetta entered, heads would swivel to look at her even if they didn’t know she was the second leader of the revolution. It wasn’t because she was unnaturally pretty, though she was good-looking enough. She just radiated charisma and power, and when you looked at her, you wanted  _ her  _ to look at  _ you _ . Annette doubted even Tadalan was immune. 

From what she could see of Adjak, the people were tired. It wasn’t bone-deep tiredness, the kind from working from before the sun rose until it set, or the kind of weariness you get from keeping secrets for too long. It was the sort of tiredness you felt when you didn’t know why you were waking up the next morning, but you did anyway, because that was how it was done. 

The kind of tiredness Annette had never felt, really, because the itch in her chest was always waking her up. 

Before long, they had arrived at an inn. Fiona dumped a considerable amount of money on the innkeeper’s desk and asked for one room. He’d glanced them up and down, eyes narrowing, before tossing a key at Fiona and pocketing his due. The room they were given was cramped and as dusty as the rest of the town, but there was a bed and enough room for a blanket on the floor. Annette twitched the blanket out of Fiona’s arms as she squeezed past the older woman and laid it out, plopping down to a sitting position. “I call the floor,” she said, and glanced up at the other two.

Fiona’s lip twitched. “I can see that,” she replied, dry as the desert. She turned to Viola, who was setting her rifle kit on the floor next to the bed. “You take first watch. Three hour shifts means all of us get six.”

“I’ve got second,” Annette yawned, feeling the exhaustion dogging her since the confrontation with Shioda pulling her down. 

Viola nodded to them, face set in hard lines, and sat in the rickety wooden chair by the bed. She winced.

“Alright?” Annette asked.

“I,” said Viola, lifting her chin, “Am perfectly alright.”

“Are you sure?” 

Viola stood back up and twisted around, groping at her leg. With a hiss, she pulled a splinter out from her upper thigh, then sat back down. “Perfectly alright,” she repeated, grimacing. Annette laughed, but a moment later, the tiredness hit her like a tidal wave. “Night,” she yawned, before dropping off completely. 

Her watch shift was uneventful, as was the journey back to Nova. The city was quiet, Tadalan’s forces having managed to keep the military at bay for the moment. They were inside as the flush of dawn began to creep, once more, over the horizon. Annette felt like she could sleep for a week at that point, but the papers had to be deposited safely into Bettie’s waiting arms first. 

The three of them came in through a back entrance in the wall, on the south side of the city. Ten minutes of walking later—oh, how Annette  _ hated  _ walking by now—and they had reached a small house on the edge of the city center, located a few blocks behind the first of the barricades It was painted a pale green, with white trim and accents, and a rocking chair was on the porch. It looked nothing like the home of a rebellion leader. 

But, Annette supposed, that was the point. 

She followed as Fiona completely bypassed the door and instead looped around to the side, hoisting herself over the fence between Bettie’s house and the neighboring one. Annette followed, finding the groove in the wood where she’d vaulted over this same fence numerous times after missions, and she heard Viola adjust her rifle kit before taking up the rear.

Fiona was leaning against the wall as she knocked on the window, tapping out the bridge of one of Bettie’s favorite songs. 

“Why not the chorus, I wonder?” Annette said out loud. 

The window slid open and Bettie’s face, her gray eyes alert despite the early hour, peered at the three of them. “Because that’s terribly obvious, and I don’t  _ do  _ obvious,” she sniffed, and slid the window open completely. “Come on in, then. And try not to track mud on my floors.”

Annette saw Fiona crack a smile, the first since the assassination attempt, and smiled too. Viola was the only one out of their trio who didn’t smile at the sight of Bettie sauntering away, her long hair unbraided and falling to her waist. 

“Dramatic,” she heard Fiona mutter, and she snorted. Annette looked down to her shoes. They were, indeed, caked in mud. So she took off her boots and held them in her left hand as she climbed through the large window and into Bettie’s sitting room, socked feet silent on the wood. She drifted into the foyer and placed her boots on the little rack Bettie had near the door, specifically for this purpose, and skipped back to the sitting room. Bettie had come back in, leaning against the wall with the easy poise she always held herself with. Fiona and Viola both brushed past her, heading for the foyer. 

Elizabetta, half of the duo that had started this whole ordeal, was shorter than Annette. But she always looked her in the eye, an implicit challenge in her steely gaze. It didn’t matter whether Bettie had her hair up in her usual impeccable braided updo or if it was unbrushed and about her shoulders. It didn’t matter if she was wearing her sharply tailored vest and skirt or in her sleeping clothes. When Bettie looked at Annette, she always felt the need to straighten her spine and set her shoulders. 

“Well?” asked Bettie, cocking an eyebrow. 

“Success,” she said. She brandished the bag with Shioda’s suspicious letters. “I’ve got the papers and Fiona has the dead look in her eyes again.”

Bettie raised both of her eyebrows this time and crossed her arms. “What went wrong?”

“Your friend, Reynaldi, took us to a safehouse. Lark assassins killed the woman who owned it before trying to kill us,” she summarized neatly, rocking back and forth on her feet. 

Her leader’s mouth was pinched. “So Lark has made its opening gambit.”

“They hadn’t already?” asked Fiona, who had come in from the foyer at last. Viola slunk in behind her.

“No,” said Bettie. “Not until now, and this places them firmly in the grasp of the government. I had hoped that would go rogue.”

Viola sneered. The movement twisted her normally pretty features into an ugly expression. “They’re Dorene lapdogs, through and through.”

Bettie ran an appraising eye over Viola. “A personal vendetta, then?”

She only pressed her lips together. Annette had never seen the other woman this angry. Normally, Viola was, if not chipper, then optimistic. She would laugh and crack jokes. But this was her furious and grieving, and she could feel the sheer amount of rage Annette imagined coiled under her skin.

Annette reached out and put a hand on Viola’s shoulder. “Lark isn’t here,” she said softly, and watched all the fight drain out of her. She suddenly seemed smaller, and more tired than before. “Yeah,” she agreed, and ran a hand through her hair. Viola looked terribly, terribly young. 

Bettie only hummed, watching them. “What of the other rogues galleries we know of?” she asked, directing her question at Fiona. 

“I was a freelancer.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But you know something.”

It was a moment of silence before Fiona sighed. “Of the mercenary and assassin groups I ran into, the only two that would actively side with the government are Lark and Crescent Rose. With any luck, the others will remain neutral.”

“Can we approach any for aid?”

“Unless Tadalan managed to balance the books with a staggering amount of money on our side, no.”

“ _ All _ of them are entirely motivated by cash?”

“Of course, Bettie.” Fiona flashed a dangerous grin. “Morality is for people who can afford it.”

“You’re horrible,” Viola groused, and Fiona’s grin widened slightly. 

“There’s a defector,” Annette said suddenly, remembering what Bellmonte had said back in the Shioda mansion. “Viola has a recording of a conversation between Regina Bellmonte and Shioda.”

But Bettie didn’t look shocked or dismayed. Instead, a slow, catlike smile wound its way onto her face. 

“They’re one of ours, then.”. 

“Of course. Jess was bored and felt like sharpening their infiltration skills, so I sent them in to pose as a low-level defector. Jess hasn’t made his report yet, but whatever information leaked is information from me.”

“Sharpen their infiltration skills?” Viola asked, her voice incredulous. “Wasn’t  _ Oliver  _ the one who taught them?”

Annette knew Oliver. She’d met him on her first day after joining Tadalan’s merry band of revolutionaries. Oliver Candell was not an imposing man, not in the slightest. He was short and stout, and he always had an easy smile, the kind that put people at ease. He had a way with telling stories to make them believable, no matter how outlandish, and cute dimples. 

He was also very, very good with stiletto knives—and the art of sticking them in your back.

“Jess may be Oliver’s little protege, but they haven’t been on big jobs yet. Only small ones. And they’re one of our best who won’t immediately be needed.” Bettie let out a long sigh. “Anyway. I’ll catch you up later. You three look dead on your feet.”

“I feel dead,” said Annette. 

Bettie shot her a wry smile. “Don’t we all,” she said, sounding far away. “There are two beds in the cellar. Careful with the one next to the door, though. The last person to use it was Wendy, and you know what she’s like.”

Annette also knew Wendy. Was friends with her, even, and had hoped to be put on a unit with her. Wendy was younger than Annette—sixteen, probably, with curly blonde hair she’d cut with a knife to brush the tips of her ears and a whip-cord frame. She had a quick wit and poked fun at everyone she met in a way that always came off as endearing, somehow, rather than rude. She was also more paranoid than Fiona in the planning stages of a job, and tended to trap her surroundings to hell and back—on a mission, with lethal ones, and at home, with prank ones.

“You haven’t cleared it?” Annette asked, wincing. 

Bettie snorted. “I figured that whoever got the bed next would have a fun time figuring it out.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Viola. “You’re the horrible one.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she said, turning around and starting to walk away. “You can report to me and Tadalan tomorrow.”

Annette saluted, knowing full well that Bettie wouldn’t see it, and fairly sprinted to what she knew was Bettie’s kitchen. She opened the cabinet next to the table, revealing a set of wooden steps leading down. “I call the bed that wasn’t Wendy’s,” she said, and rushed down the stairs to plop facedown on the bed farther from the door. The linen smelled faintly like Bettie’s laundry soap—thyme and lemon. She only had a second to appreciate the feeling of being horizontal in a safe, secure bed before pain lanced through her right foot. Annette let out a strangled curse, whipping back upright. A  _ mousetrap _ , of all things, had clamped onto the side of her foot. 

“She trapped  _ both  _ beds?” Annette heard Viola ask from the stairs. 

Fiona snickered. “Apparently.”

Annette cast her eyes to the ceiling, praying for patience before bending and prying the trap off her foot. She threw it at Fiona, who dodged gracefully. It ended up hitting Viola in the shoulder. The girl sputtered, backing up a step, and narrowed her eyes. 

With slow, deliberate movements, she picked up the pillow from the other bed. She advanced on Annette, murderous intent coming off of her in waves. 

Annette made eye contact and smiled, a big, beaming grin that seemed to incense her further. Viola stomped closer and her foot hit the thin trip wire Annette had jumped over in her headlong rush to the supposed safety of the bed, triggering a dart launcher Wendy had, somehow, jury-rigged to the desk between the beds. A rubber dart flew through the air and hit Viola in the cheek. 

She let out an inarticulate scream of rage and threw the pillow at Annette, who caught it and giggled. She promptly stopped giggling when Viola reached into the desk and pulled out a small piece of paper with spidery black lines crisscrossing it. 

“Shit,” Annette breathed, her voice muttered by the pillow, and scrambled off the bed. Viola smiled, put the tag on the side of the bedframe, and vaulted up to sit in the center of the bed. She activated the tag with a murmur, and the lattice spread across the wood and sheets, completely avoiding the woman herself. “Touch it, I dare you.”

Annette cocked her head, looking at it. She hadn’t seen this kind of tag before. 

“Fiona!” she called. The other woman was busy picking mousetraps and trip wires out from under and around the bed closest to the door.

“What.”

“You’re the fearless leader who cares deeply for her subordinates, yes?”

Fiona’s head popped out from behind the bed and her eyes zeroed in on the lattice. “Annette, I swear, if you touch that—”

Annette let her hand drift closer. 

“Damn it, Annette!” Fiona came over, nimbly avoiding the second wire Annette had noticed and hoped she’d trigger. Viola was smiling a shit-eating grin. 

“I’m going to touch it,” Annette said solemnly. 

“You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“You’ll stop me, won’t you?” Annette said, pouting, and moved to touch the spidery lines of the lattice.

In a burst of speed, Fiona knocked Annette’s hand away. But Annette’s fingers were faster, and she grabbed Fiona’s wrist. With a small tug, the older woman’s hand brushed the lattice, and Fiona froze as if she had been struck.

The lattice crawled up her skin to cover her hand, holding it in the same position it had had when she brushed the bedframe. “Viola,” Fiona growled, “I can’t feel my hand.”

“I can’t believe that worked.” 

“ _ Viola. _ ”

“Sorry, sorry,” she grumbled, and tapped Fiona’s fingers. “Release,” she said, and the black lines shattered and fell. 

Fiona rubbed her hand. “What the  _ hell  _ is that?” she asked. 

“Experimental tag, coded not to affect me and only release on my command. I’m trying to get it to cover the whole body and freeze them in place, but I’ve only managed localized areas so far.”

“Why didn’t you bring one of those on the mission?” Annette asked. That might have been helpful.

“I didn’t have time to grab one. Bettie fairly rushed us out the door, remember? And I can't really make tags on the job.”

Annette frowned. “Remember Reynaldi’s gun? With the funny bullets?”

“Vividly.”

“Where can I steal you one of those?”

Viola goggled at her. “You can’t,” she said finally. “The only person who makes guns like that and blank bullets is a gunsmith in Alizet. It’s the only place Reynaldi could have gotten them unless he has some sort of black market dealer.”

Annette hummed. “I’ll ask Bettie.”

“Why on earth would she know?”

“She said Reynaldi was her friend, didn’t she?”

Viola’s face scrunched up in disgust. “She did. She might know, then.” Annette smiled at her, and shoved her off the bed.


	6. Farewell

By the next day, the city was on fire.

“Move, move,” Bettie barked. Soot streaked her cheeks and her hair was plastered to her face. “We’re evacuating to the western fields, but get the hell out of here!”

“The others?” Viola heard Fiona ask as they stuffed their clothes into their packs and grabbed as much as they dared.

“Tadalan ordered it himself,” Bettie said, roughly grabbing a bag and swinging it onto her shoulders. She was the first out the door, and the three other women followed her. Viola brought up the rear. As soon as she stepped out of Bettie’s home, she looked up. Smoke, thick and cloying, drifted through the air and clogged the sky. The fire hadn’t reached their street yet but Viola could see it, see the tongues of flame licking at the sky from two blocks over. The bright orange-red blazed between her and the pale blue of morning. 

She hoped, desperately, that everyone at Tadalan’s house had made it out safely.  _ She  _ would be there, because she never really left the bounds of Nova and indeed, of Tadalan’s library and lab. 

“Viola!” she hard Fiona shout, and twisted around.  _ Distracted _ .

Thoughts of Riki always distracted her. Usually, she could avoid thinking about her on jobs, but now in Nova, she’d let herself become lazy. She’d let her thoughts drift. 

Fiona, Annette, and Bettie were all running down the street, joining the throngs of citizens also evacuating. As she ran after them, rifle kit clanking painfully against her shoulder, she couldn’t help but look back at the fire climbing higher and higher on the buildings. That was when she saw the soldiers, wearing the dove gray uniforms of the Dorene military. 

She breathed out a curse and ran faster, outstripping panicking men and women to catch up to Fiona and Annette. “Soldiers,” she breathed, clutching her kit tighter.

Fiona looked back at her and those dark eyes of hers, almost black, fixed on a point over Viola’s shoulder. Her lips pressed together into a thin line. “Bettie, we have company,” she said, trusting the older woman’s sharp ears to hear her over the roar of the flames and the crowd. Bettie’s gait didn’t falter. “Tadalan expected this,” was all she said before impossibly increasing her pace. Viola only grit her teeth and kept running. 

It became increasingly difficult to get through the crowds of people, all wearing their pajamas and holding random things they had managed to grab while evacuating. Viola pushed through them as quickly as she could, trying not to jostle anyone too hard. But her kit bumped into more shoulders than she’d like as she worked her way through them. One man grabbed her own shoulder, face panicked. “What’s happening?” he yelled, shaking her. 

“I don’t know,” she yelled back, and tried to bat his hands away, but his grip was too strong. “You must know,” he shouted, and shook her again. A hand suddenly clamped down into his arm. “Let go of her,” Fiona growled, surprising both of them with the ferocity in that one command. Her usually calm leader looked downright feral in the hazy light of the street, her teeth bared and eyebrows furrowed. 

The man, wisely, let go. Viola shoved past him, and started jogging next to Fiona. “Thanks,” she said weakly.

Fiona let out a noncommittal noise, scanning the throngs of evacuees. Viola watched as the muscles in her jaw flexed. “Annette and Bettie are somewhere up ahead,” she muttered. 

“Western fields,” Viola reminded her, and Fiona nodded grimly. They set off again, avoiding the parts of the streets where the crowds were thickest. 

It was about ten minutes later that they reached the western wall. The gate was pulled open as wide as it could go and people streamed through the gap, spilling into the fields stretching from the western edge of Nova for miles. They hung around in groups, some crying and others arguing loudly. Fiona ignored them all and led Viola to a copse of trees some distance away from the wall. Bettie and Annette were there, sweaty and gasping the fresher air away from the fire. Others were there too, some that Viola recognized and some she did not. A short, middle-aged man—Oliver Bentle. A head of curly blonde hair—Wendy Lazlan. Two men with the same features—Kanne and Fenne Dreyden, the twins. A woman leaning against a tree, a bottle in her hands. Riki, who had never told her a last name.

She had never asked. 

Viola walked over to her and leaned against the same tree. The woman shook the bottle in her hand, the dark liquid inside sloshing against the glass. Bubbles frothed at the top. “You don’t usually shake them so violently,” she observed, not knowing how to greet her. 

Riki looked up at her, a tired expression on her pale face. “It’s an emulsion,” she said flatly. “And not volatile. I can afford to shake it.” 

Viola hummed. “Makes sense,” she said. 

“It was the only thing close enough to grab when Winterfell gave the order,” she replied, and let a long, frustrated sigh. “All my work is gone.”

Viola shrugged. “Maybe the fire left his house untouched?” she said, though she knew it was unlikely. 

Riki let out a short laugh. “I torched the building myself,” she said sharply, and held Viola’s gaze. “There were soldiers swarming the streets and I had enough flammable material to make sure they would find nothing important.”

“Ah,” she said weakly. Riki broke eye contact to glance back at the billowing smoke over the city. Riki was their poison expert, the woman they went to for silent assassinations and if they needed chemical equipment on their job. Her lab probably held everything important to her, and there was nothing Viola knew to say that would comfort her.

“I’m sorry?” she offered, hating the quiet, empty look on the woman’s face. She was always moving, and to see her now, still and solemn, tugged at Viola's heart. 

“Do not be,” said Riki. “It’s just something else Dorenon has to pay for.”

Viola didn’t know what to say to that either. Instead, she drank in the sight of her, whole and relatively unharmed. The last time she had seen the woman was the night before they left for the Shioda job. It had only been about a week and a half ago, but already, leaving felt like it had been in an entirely different lifetime. 

Viola had paused in the doorway of Tadalan’s workroom, having heard noises as she passed by. “Riki,” she said, her heart jumping into her throat. 

The tall woman perched in one of the chairs cut slanted black eyes up at her. She was squatting on the seat like some sort of flightless bird, boots off and leaning against the leg of her desk. Her long fingers were toying with a glass vial containing an amber liquid, tilting it back and forth so the glass caught the shards of moonlight streaking through the open window. 

“It’s late,” Viola tried. 

Riki’s eyes slid away from Viola as if she no longer interested her. Viola supposed she deserved it for being so obnoxiously obvious, and shut her mouth. Riki’s dark hair, cut sharply at her chin at an angle, was as pin-straight as ever. Despite the late hour, she looked perfectly unruffled. 

She watched as Riki held the vial up the light, swirled it once, and on some unseen signal, flicked the cork stopper out with her thumb. She picked up a glass dropper and pulled up some of the liquid, inspected it, and put a single drop on the edge of a wine glass. The droplet rolled down the side of the glass before coming to rest at the bottom. Riki picked up another vial, this one clear, and tipped it into the wine glass. The copper droplet disappeared and the resulting mixture was transparent. 

“Smell this,” said Riki, thrusting the wine glass at her. Viola took it, mildly scared she would drop it by accident. “Why?”

“If you have the time to stand there and gawk, you have time to tell me what that smells like.”

“Will it kill me?”

“No.”

Viola sniffed the liquid. There was no scent at all. If she didn’t know better, she would think it was water. 

“Probably.”

Viola pushed the glass away, holding at arm's length. “Riki—”

The woman laughed and took it away. “Relax, hummingbird. If it was going to kill you, you would be on the floor retching already.”

“Did you know that before you handed it to me?”

Riki only shrugged, infuriatingly blase as ever, and placed the wine glass in front of her. She swirled it once like she had done to the original vial and Viola watched, entranced, by the refracted light playing over her sharp cheekbones. 

“Drink it,” Viola said suddenly. “I dare you.”

She looked at Viola, an eyebrow raised. In surprise or derision, she wasn’t quite sure. But Viola had only wanted Riki to look at her again. 

A small, dangerous smile pulled at her lips. “You first.”

She held out the wine glass. 

Viola took it, staring into the clear liquid. “It won’t kill me, will it?” she asked, feeling a spike of fear in her gut. 

Riki tilted her head, her black hair brushing against her bare shoulder. Her skin was a pale cream under the moon and her shirt was askew. Those fathomless eyes of hers peered into Viola’s own. “You never know,” said Riki. 

Viola cracked a smile. “I guess I don’t,” she said, and tipped the glass’s contents into her mouth. It sure tasted like water, but there was a strange aftertaste she couldn’t pinpoint. It was...sweet, almost, like the scent of flower petals. 

She waited a moment, heart racing. But she felt no different.

Riki almost looked disappointed. “Nothing?” she asked, playing with the bottle of dark sludge again. 

“No—” Viola cut herself off with a retch and fell to her knees. Her vision swam, a riot of colors exploding behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes. Her stomach threatened to unload itself onto Tadalan’s hardwood floor.

Someone’s hands, cool on her burning skin, lifted her chin up and pinched her nose shut. She couldn’t breathe. Was she going to die, all on a stupid dare? But as she opened her mouth, gasping for air, something thick and slimy was going down her throat. She swallowed reflexively, then again, trying to get whatever it was down. 

She inhaled, shakily, as the urge to retch subsided and her vision returned. Viola opened her eyes to see Riki in front of her, a dropper in one hand with the dark liquid of the small bottle. Her face was placid except for the smallest furrow between her eyebrows. The tiny expression of concern made Viola feel giddy. 

“Your turn,” she rasped.

Riki sat back on her haunches and picked up the wine glass. “You spilled poison all over the floor,” she said, disapproving. Viola looked to her right, and sure enough, a puddle of whatever had been in that glass was seeping into the wood. So much for not ruining Tadalan’s floor.

“I wonder if there’s still any of it in my mouth,” Viola mused. “It’s not like I swished that dark stuff around.”

“Possibly,” said Riki, peering at her. “You should do that.” She held out the dropper. Instead of taking it, like she probably expected Viola to, she grabbed her hand and pulled Riki in closer. “You haven’t finished your dare,” she breathed. Her heart was still racing, racing impossibly faster. 

Riki raised an eyebrow. “You spilled all the poison.”

“Not all of it,” said Viola, and kissed her.

It had been as much a first hello as a goodbye, before Viola left on one of the most important missions for the revolution. 

Now, the two women stared up at the pale morning sky. “Hummingbird,” said Riki, turning her head slightly. 

“Yeah?”

“Those are soldiers.”

Viola followed her gaze and her heart sank. “They can’t know who we are,” she said. “All our operations had us masked.”

A muscle in Riki’s jaw flexed. “They’re still coming this way.”

“We’re a book club,” she reminded her. 

The other woman gave her a look of utter disbelief. “With a sniper rifle?” she pointed out, and Viola grit her teeth. “Recreational hobby.”

“Right.” Riki took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Remind me of this month’s book.”

“ _ Sanctity _ . The last work of Gustav Flore. Tranquility and the importance of order over chaos,” Viola muttered, as the first Dorene soldiers drew up to the group of revolutionaries. 

Book club members, she reminded herself. Book club members.

“You there,” said one of the soldiers sharply. He wore the dove gray uniform of the Dorene military, though he looked singed at the edges. “What district?” 

Viola pasted a worried frown on her face. “The south. Has the fire spread very far?” 

The soldier grunted. “As far as we can tell, it started in the north and spread eastward with the wind. We set up barricades. Hopefully, it won’t touch the west or south districts.” He turned a piercing, slightly panicky gaze to Riki. “South as well?”

She nodded. 

The soldier gave a nod back before moving on, speaking to each civilian and asking them their districts. Viola watched as he returned to his group and strained her ears to catch the thread of their conversation. “All south and west district,” she heard him say. “They went to the closest exit. What the hell are they thinking up in command? We should be fighting the fires, not interrogating the evacuees.”

“Shut it, Wesley,” another hissed. “You’re going to get yourself toilet duty for  _ weeks _ . Don’t fuck with command right now. They’re tense as all hell with the general breathing down their necks.”

“People could be dying right now—” Wesley tried, but another soldier cut him off. “Do your job,” she said, a bite to her voice that Viola could hear as clear as day. 

“Protecting people is supposed to be our job!” he argued. 

“Right now, our job is to find and detain suspicious persons. Like that girl with the  _ gun  _ you somehow missed!” Wesley whirled to look at Viola, but she was already gone, weaving through the crowd of tired-looking evacuees. She dumped her rifle kit some distance away under a dense thicket of bushes before making her way back to Riki, who was being interrogated by the female guard. “She said she was looking for her mother,” Riki was saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you want me to say—”

“Are you looking for me?” Viola asked, walking up. She tried her best to channel the innocent girl she’d been once, before everything. Before her father had died. 

Killed, she corrected herself. Before he had been killed. She’d found him slumped over his desk in his study, a bullet in the back of his head, the bright Alizet sun streaming in through the glass windows. All she’d had to go on was the calling card his killers had left on the surface of the desk—a crude bird in flight seared into the wood. 

The female guard turned to her, mouth pressed into a firm line. “Where did you put your gun?” she barked, a hand on her belt. Viola looked despite herself and saw her clutching a strip of paper, the tight scrawl of a magic lattice peeking out between her fingers. “What gun?” she asked, schooling her face so she looked worried and confused.

“The  _ rifle _ ,” she hissed. 

“What rifle,” Viola repeated, furrowing her brows. ‘I don’t—I don’t have a gun, I’m a seamstress—” The woman snarled at her, bringing up her hand, and Viola took a step back. She really hoped this wouldn’t devolve into a fight, not with so many witnesses. 

“Ara, stop threatening the civilians,” said a deep voice. Viola whipped her head around to see another soldier stepping up. He was much taller than her, Riki, and Ara, and his face was stern. “None of us saw this gun you keep talking about.” He gestured at Riki, who was shaking, and Viola, who had turned pale. “Please,” she said, adding a quaver to her voice. “I don’t know anything about a gun, or anything, please, I was just looking for my mother—”

“I believe you,” the big guy said gently. “What does she look like?”

“Like me,” Viola said, hugging herself. “The same hair, and the same eyes, but she’s taller, and she wears blue earrings.” 

Or so she had been told. She had never known her mother very well, as she’d died when Viola was three of some wasting sickness. The portraits in her home had always portrayed a stern-looking woman with a clenched jaw and hard eyes. 

“We’ll find her,” said the man. “Your name?”

“Nareya,” she whispered, picking a name at random. Hopefully, she wouldn’t run into these particular soldiers again. “Nareya Gadge.”

“We’ll find her, Nareya,” he repeated, and turned away. He took the other soldier, Ara, by the elbow. “Come on.”

Ara went with him begrudgingly, shooting suspicious glances at Viola over her shoulder as she walked away. Viola let out a breath and slumped against the tree trunk.

“I thought I was going to die,” she muttered. 

“I did not,” Riki said primly, and took out a vial from her pocket. “Do not allow skin contact,” Viola read off the label, and shivered. “What’s it do?”

“It consumes protein. It would have burned through the female guard’s hands in seconds.”

“You’re terrifying.”

“Absolutely,” Riki said, and she smiled. It was a rare thing, Riki’s smile, Viola thought. It was vastly more likely to see her baring her teeth. Her smile wasn’t threatening. It was open, and happy, and Viola found it entirely at odds with nearly getting arrested and having their base of operations burn down. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing,” she replied, but the smile stayed. “We just got to live a little longer.”

Viola looked at her, then up at the plumes of smoke still drifting from inside the walls, then to the soldiers still milling around. 

“I didn’t say  _ forever _ , hummingbird.” Riki was still trembling slightly, but Viola realized—it wasn’t with fear or anxiety. It was with excitement. 

In answer to her unasked question, the other woman’s smile widened. “It makes me feel alive,” was all she said, before taking Viola’s hand in her own. Viola froze at the contact, at the feeling of Riki’s soft hands against her own, calloused ones.

But she held on tight, and Viola gave a squeeze in answer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed some minor things in the previous chapters to edit out some plot holes that would have quickly become glaring as the story progresses. My MO for writing is basically "what's the worst thing that could happen to these characters?" whenever I don't know what to write next, which, as you can imagine, means I'm not very equipped for foreshadowing. I also changed a few minor names, so Novareen is now just Nova. A bit of a shorter chapter today, my apologies.


	7. temporary note

It's hard to write about a revolution right now. This is just a temporary to say I don't know when my next update will be, or if there will _be_ a next update in any reasonable time frame. I do know that practically nobody is reading this (I mean, it is an original work in a primary fanfic site lol), so I don't think it's too much of an issue. But...yeah. It's difficult to write about revolts and violence and revolution right now, even if the good guys are going to win in the end. I don't think I'd be able to maintain a healthy distance between myself and the story, you know? Anyway. I hope you all are staying safe and doing well. 

Peace. 

\- thecrazychatlady


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